


Sand

by RedPen (GardenVatiety)



Series: The Wounded World [2]
Category: Zootopia (2016)
Genre: Adventure, Enemies to Friends, F/M, Humor, Magic, Swordfighting
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-04-25
Updated: 2019-07-24
Packaged: 2020-01-31 16:22:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 8
Words: 26,441
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18594988
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GardenVatiety/pseuds/RedPen
Summary: As the shadows of an unspeakable villainy grow long and dark, our bold heroes head east in pursuit of the next Tooth—one of the magical stones that will give Judith the means to repel the evil bearing down upon their defenseless world. But this time, the challenge is of a scale and sum beyond anything they've encountered yet. A challenge that will drag them to the brink of destruction.Because, if they're going to survive, they're going to have to be friends.





	1. A City in the Middle of No-Where

Sand, as far as the eye could see.

Great rolling dunes of it, baking under the unforgiving sun which ruled from a cloudless sky. The constant wind shaped the golden powder into vast mountains with serpentine ridges, transient despite their size, wandering the desert like pilgrims in search of some more hospitable clime. It was otherwise uniform and featureless, save for lumps of black scoria spat out by an ancient chorus of volcanoes, and for the occasional silhouette of birds against the blue. Nothing bloomed or blossomed in this cauterised wasteland; even the rocks seemed withered and shrivelled, like desiccated fruit, their proverbial blood impossibly dried up.

The Ubdi Desert was an insurvivable place. Broad and unchartable. Treacherous. A great dry coffin for the bones of foolish travellers.

A wagon rolled along in that bleak desert.

It was not a fine example of the word, a rough-built rulley with hay-cart in tow, yoked to a pair of ‘clickers’—gigantic beetles with scytheblade mandibles and obsidian shells. Strange creatures such as these were commonly enthralled in these obscure corners of the world as drudges to move heavy loads, though clickers were a little on the docile and dimwitted side, and could only be coerced into progress by a tiny cage stuffed with food and dangled just before whatever apparatus they used to smell. The bed of the wagon they pulled was piled high with assorted merchandise bundled up in a sun-bleached canvas, lashed down with ropes like provisions secured for a dangerous ocean voyage. Haphazardly fastened to these cords were pots and pans and other domestic chattel, banging and clanging with the carts bumping and clattering like the rehearsals of some ragtag orchestra of recklessly drunk percussionists. The wagon had one oblong wheel, care of whatever incompetent wainwright had cobbled it together, and it loped from side to side with trochilic imbalance, the vehicular equivalent of a limp.

If the wagon-driver was upset by these structural shortcomings he kept it to himself, content to lazily watch the distant horizon, chew a stalk of grass, and keep a lax grip on the reigns. He was an old and shambolic wolf with bulging joints and sinewy limbs, his fur permanently filthy from his endless journeying. A laughably patchy straw hat clung to his head, and to call his clothes threadbare would be to insinuate the presence of any threads at all. He looked like some animate scarecrow, grown tired of its eponymous duties and uprooted from the fields.

The wagon trundled forward, without companion except for the sun and a solitary buzzard that wheeled lazily in the endless blue overhead.

Then, suddenly, the wolf woahed his mounts to a clamorous halt and dismounted. He went and adjusted the yokestraps on his charges, muttering praise to them as he did; he would have petted them, but he suspected they could not feel it through their thick chitin, not to mention that, after a morning under the brutal sun, their black shells were hot enough to fry eggs. Then he wandered past his rully and thumped on the gap-set planks of the hay-cart with his pop-knuckled fist.

“Alright, you two,” he drawled. “This is where you get off.”

A pair of slender grey ears emerged hesitantly from under the heaped chaff, and then the rest of Judith followed, blinking groggily at the disorienting, heat-bleared world around her. She combed the hay out of her hair, and then roughly shook a shape lying beside her.

“Hey, we’ve stopped,” she muttered, and slithered out of the wagon bed, planting her booted feet in the baking sand. When there was no further activity in the hay-cart tray, Judith put her paws on her hips.

“Come on, Nick. You can’t just sleep in the back of a merchant’s wagon for the rest of your life. Get down from there.”

An orange paw suddenly appeared above the wagon’s box side, gestured rudely, and vanished just as quickly.

Judith sighed and focused instead on stretching her jolt-worn muscles, chirring in satisfaction as her muscles creaked and her joints popped. She’d been in that wagon for six days straight, rocking like a boat in a storm, buried up to her head in dry grass in a desperate attempt to ward off the desert’s fearsome heat. It had been a truly appalling time which, given Judith’s experiences to date, put it up against some healthy competition. She was just happy to be out of the cart and standing on her own two legs again.

She was so happy, in fact, that it was a while before she looked around and realised there was absolutely nothing here. It was, by any criteria, an exact replica of the desert where they had started their expedition, as if they had simply travelled in one immense, aimless circuit. There was certainly no sign of the city that was their ultimate destination.

For a moment she stared blankly at the desolation around her, then spun on her heel and went to the wagon-driver, who looked—her eyes deceived her, surely—to be climbing back into his ragged seat, intending to carry on his journey after abandoning them in the middle of nowhere.

“Sir?” she interrupted. “You...you said this was where we get off?”

The wagon-driver spat. “That’s right.”

“Huh. Ok. Well, that’s a problem then, because _where we get off_ is supposed to coincide with _here are the city gates_ , isn’t it?” She gestured around at the evident lack of civilisation and added, rather unnecessarily, “There’s no city here.”

“Wasn’t part of any deal I recall,” he returned. “I can’t get custom in Ashkadod, not for the kind of wares I’m selling. You want to go there so badly, you can go on foot from here.”

It had been two months since Judith and Nick had left the Deadstones behind, pursuing the nebulous call of the next Tooth across countless miles of countryside. Two months of laborious trekking; two months of sleeping on hard ground in impromptu windbreaks, weathering the occasional riot of freezing rain; two months of stones in their boots and dirt up their noses. Two months that had culminated in this six-day ordeal in the back of a hay-cart, her ears stoppered with tufts of cotton to try and keep out the tremendous racket of the merchant’s clanking tower of goods.

Two months of no company except for Nick.

Judith hadn’t had a lot of straw to begin with (that’s figurative straw—there was plenty of actual straw stuck to her fur), and now she was well and truly down to the last one.

“Listen here,” she hissed, her temper starting to sizzle. “I did not climb aboard your hideous little caravan six days ago with the understanding that I would be tossed out on the empty sand like a bucket of slops. I offered you good coin, and I won’t settle for this.”

The wagon-driver was unimpressed with her anger, even though she had two blades swinging from her belt and didn’t strictly look like the sort of rabbit to balk at drawing them. “Look, missy, I’ll be frank with you, save us some time. That city is bad news, and I ain't going there, not for anything you can offer.  I’m taking the path north to Tertaroa. So, if your little heart’s set on going to Ashkadod, you’d best start walking. And if that doesn’t tickle your fancy, you can jump back on and keep going north with me, Chrissy and Pete over here.”

Defeated, Judith looked despairingly at the pair of clickers. One of them let out an otherworldly hiss and defecated wetly on the sand.

“Let me talk to my companion.”

She turned and walked back to Nick, who had finally dragged himself down from the hay-cart and was buckling his knifebelt. His black rucksack lay in the sand at his feet, loaded with his scant but precious possessions: a pawful of loose coins, a vial of reeking algae, a smoked chicken sausage for emergencies (that is, it was hard enough to be used, in an emergency, as an impromptu truncheon). And, of course, one lump of priceless folkloric Amaranthite ore.

“Carrots, it is hotter than Madame Scoville's Tongue-buster Mustard,” Nick moaned, drawing his hood over his head to ward off the sun’s fury. “What’s going on? Have we stopped to fix that damned wonky wheel finally?”

“This is as far as he’s taking us,” Judith explained.

Nick paused, scrutinising her face. He would have thought her joking, except that he’d never known her to utter so much as a pun before.

“This is it?”

“He says if we want to go to Ashkadod, we’ve got to walk the rest of the way.”

Nick nodded thoughtfully, scratching the fur on his chin.

“We could kill him,” he finally suggested.

Judith squeezed the bridge of her nose with her fingers. “We’re not killing him,” she sighed.

“Well...could we maim him?”

“No.”

“Just a light maiming.”

“Nick, I am honestly not in the mood for japes at the moment. I don’t know why I’m telling you that, because you’re you, and you don’t care about the feelings of others, but let’s just say that the only one in danger of being maimed here is _you_. Unless you start contributing some useful suggestions to get us out of this predicament.”

Nick grinned, and managed, “Well, at least you haven’t paid him yet.”

From the front of the rulley, they then heard the driver call out, “Oh, about the forty gold coins you owe me…”

Judith starred in complete amazement, and then glanced back at Nick.

“How light a maiming?”

 

\---

 

After a half-hour of further negotiations—shouting, citations of civil law, a few implied threats that bounced right off the wolf’s oblivious skull—Judith settled on ten gold pieces to cover the provisions they’d consumed and the ‘privilege’ of his transport, and threw in a few additional coppers to buy the wolf’s patchy straw hat. She slashed a brace of cuts in its crown for her ears to poke through and then crammed the hat on her head, trying not to imagine what kind of ridiculous bumpkin-knight she must have looked. She would have emulated Nick and retreated under her cowl, but her cloak had been ripped badly at the shoulder in their last adventure, and while she’d had a go at mending it herself on the trail between there and here, recently all the stitches had fallen out, so she’d bundled it up and packed it away to save it from degenerating any further. And she dared not risk wandering under the furious sun without something to shade her brow—rabbits were not exactly suited to the desert’s punishing aridity.

Without further pause, she set off up the dunes, struggling up the crumbling slopes, her footfalls leaving a string of deep wells in her wake.

“Hey, what’s the hurry, Sir Plants-a-lot?” Nick asked, setting off behind her.

“Ashkadod is miles away yet,” Judith replied sourly. “The sun will be nearing the horizon before we get there, and I don’t want to sleep unprotected in the desert. There’s scorpions, poisonous insects, little sand vipers. Also, the temperature falls low enough to carpet the dunes in frost.” She paused at the crest of the hill, surveying the empty distance where the miraged horizon bubbled and warped, as if the heat was great enough to melt the sky into the sand like wax. “I deserve a soft mattress and clean linen for once in this miserable journey.”

“Not to mention,” Nick added, his mouth bending in an impish grin, “that, without any firewood to burn, we’d have to share body warmth to survive—snuggle, or die.”

Judith turned and fixed him with an imperious glare. There was a time, long ago now, when she thought this villainous vulpine might be undergoing a change for the better, might have been smooth and polished marble underneath his gravelly exterior. But whatever camaraderie they had amassed battling skeletons in the forbidding depths below Black Peak had blown away with the wind in the days that followed. Now, all that was left was the same abrasive pumice she’d been forced to tolerate since they’d first met.

“I think I’d rather die,” she retorted hotly.

“What, the same way you’d rather have died than have my lips near yours?” Nick shot back. “Because that happened, and you’re still alive…”

He chuckled cruelly as Judith quickened her pace, all but sprinting down the other side of the dune to escape his rebarbative wit. Except the rolling desert landscape offered no impediment to acoustics, and he cupped his paws about his muzzle and cried out to her.

“Also, I know what your butt feels like!”

 

\---

 

The sun was rushing to its daily embrace with the western rim of the world when Judith, deliberately walking as fast and far ahead of Nick as she could manage, crested a dune and suddenly paused, as did Nick when he appeared at her side.

Below them, under the beautiful spell of dusk’s burnishing, lay Ashkadod—the Jewel of the East.

It was utterly immense, this glistening city miraculously thriving on an isolated frontier. It was made of white sandstone quarried from the bosom of the encircling desert, its tallest towers sporting golden cupolas that shone like lighthouse beacons, even in the fading light of dusk. Encircling it entirely were forbidding octagonal walls, twenty feet high to the first ramparts and a further ten to the second, interrupted at regular intervals by domed watchtowers that were taller still. Within these fortifications lay Ashkadod’s houses and stores and workshops, a sprawl of tiled roofs, the flesh of the city, streets wide and withered branching in all directions like veins. The city proper was over 100,000 acres, but its inhabitancy did not terminate at its boundaries; for miles beyond, an extempore community of tents and ramshackle huts crowded the city walls, the caravansaries and saloons, the destitute and the displaced.

Most striking of all, however, was the grand alcazar rising up from Ashkadod’s center, who’s foundations dwarfed every building around it, the palace proper soaring higher yet, thirty dizzying feet of the finest ashlar architecture anyone had ever laid eyes on. Shining on its crown was an enormous green dome that looked from a distance like polished jade but was, in fact, a canopy of lush vegetation, somehow sown and tended to despite the sun’s murderous heat.

It was, undeniably, an evocative sight. A jewel indeed.

It was not, however, the sight that seized Judith’s and Nick’s attention. As arresting and beautiful as it was, it was still just a city, a heap of organised stones like any other. And next to it was a sight that was wholly unique, without analog or precedent elsewhere in the world.

Butting against the city’s border, right up to the walls where it gently lapped, and stretching all the way to the horizon where it vanished beyond the curve of the earth, was a white ocean.

The Great Sand Sea.

Judith had read of it in weighty volumes from her home’s library. Nick had heard of it from tavern gossipers. But neither of them were prepared for the reality of its vastness or peculiarity, this mighty ocean of fine gypsum, all perfectly white like an exposed bone protruding through the world’s torn skin. For a while both stood unspeaking, awestruck into silence by that wide cretaceous sweep, the desert silent around them save the rattle of windswept grains tumbling down the duneface and the squawk of a lone buzzard kiting the sky above.

“That,” Nick finally said, “is very pretty.”

“It’s nine hundred miles from here to the other side,” Judith said, recalling words laid down by some past chronicler, a traveller less burdened than herself who could afford the time to inquire after such details. “That’s where Ashkadod’s wealth comes from; they send ships out on the sandflow to trade gold and spice with other city-states.” They stared a little longer, both consumed with comprehending that such an unaccountable thing existed, before Judith jutted her chin toward it and said, “That’s where the next Tooth is. Somewhere on that white ocean. Somewhere beyond the horizon.”

“Are you sure about that?” Nick asked.

Judith buried her paw under her collar, and when she withdrew it there was bright cerulean light spilling out from between her fingers. Therein lay Judith’s prized possession—a magical stone that gave her the power to hurl objects aside as if they weighed nothing at all. It, and its seven sister stones, was why she was here, the whole reason for the months upon months of pain and peril. For unless they were reunited, the ghosts of her slaughtered kin would never rest...and something worse still was coming.

“They’re calling to one another,” she said. “And I can hear them. I’m sure.”

Then she caught Nick’s eyes; they had shifted from the nonpareil sight before them to the azure sparkle in her palm, and they oozed with covetous greed.

“Maybe you should let me hold it for a moment,” he said. “Just to make sure you’re hearing is right.”

Quickly, Judith stuffed the jewel back into her tunic, saying, “That’s not happening, Nick.” Of the two Teeth she had, one always hung around her neck on a length of silver chain, and the other, for which she had yet to acquire a bezel so it could join the first on her necklace, was secreted in a pocket inside her tunic. They were not objects which she would stand to part with.

“Not even a little poke?”

“We’ve been over this, fox.”

“Yes, yes, I know,” Nick sighed, rolling his eyes. “Only the Anointed can touch them, something awful will happen to me, blah blee blurgh. I was only funning with you. Gods, you really do worry too much, Cotton-toes.”

“No, Nick,” she muttered under her breath. “I’m pretty sure I worry exactly the right amount…”

They descended the dune clumsily, taking exaggerated steps in the soft terrain and leaving gaping craters that quickly filled in behind them.

“I’ll tell you something,” Nick said, wincing as his boot-top dipped below the sand and immediately filled with coarse grains. “These Teeth of yours could have scattered themselves somewhere more convenient.”

“Well then I wouldn’t have needed to buy your help to get them back then, would I?”

“Exactly. We’d be happier mammals all around.”

“It’s their way,” she reminded him. “Their...behaviour, their nature, call it what you will. When they are threatened, they seek solitude, and field guardians from whatever source they deem necessary to protect themselves. Wherever they land stands to become a dangerous place.”

“Well, at least they haven’t bedevilled the city,” Nick remarked, stretching and smiling. “I guess we will be safe and comfortable tonight…”

They emerged from the valley of two sandhills and found themselves at the flats that lead to Ashkadod’s gates. They also came across the first of several abandoned waygates, arched outposts that had once formed the city’s outermost line of defence. In centuries gone by they would have been met here by unsmiling guards with drawn bows and questions barked in a severe eastern tongue, questions which had to be answered quickly and correctly to pass by unharmed.

But it did not matter that the guards were gone and the white bricks were crumbling back into the sand. As they drew close, Judith halted in her tracks, her eyes wide with dread, her heart sinking just like the sun in its duskward decline. For hanging from the outpost’s ancient flagstaffs were banners, twisting in the the desert breeze.

Each bore the symbol of a claw with three slash marks.

The sigil of Lord Gideon Grey.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey everybody! I'm back! It's been way too long.
> 
> Naturally, there's a good reason for my extended absence, and only part of it was an overpowering inclination to eat chocolate biscuits on the couch while watching nature documentaries. I do lead a busy life. Also, I'm changing the way I do things, writing the whole story, or significant parts thereof, so that I can go back and do editing after the later chapters are finished. Not that I was unhappy with the way The Hunt turned out, but I felt like I was leaving its overall quality to luck by publishing chapter-by-chapter, and I'm not prepared to do that again. Hopefully the effort shows.
> 
> If you're a new reader, let me extend you a hearty welcome. If you read Quest to a Place of Extreme Unpleasantness, then let me extend you a hearty welcome back. I know it's been a long time, so, just in case you don't feel like reading it again for context, here are the cliffnotes:  
> 1\. Judith = warrior, member of a slaughtered clan called the Custodians  
> 2\. Nick = skiving, conniving ne'er-do-well in a black cloak, hired to help her  
> 3\. Trying to get back displaced magical gems to halt some impending catastrophe  
> 4\. They have two of them, and are going for three  
> 5\. They get along together about as well as a vegan and a person in a hat made of bacon
> 
> I'm just going to leave it there for now. Again, it feels really good to be back. Not having anything to post left a big hole in my life, and while it's not like this is the only thing I do for fun, nothing quite compares with the sensation of clicking 'post' and waiting for people to experience what you've created. That's better than an entire pack of Arnott's Tim-Tams and watching Blue Planet from start to end.
> 
> Kudos and comment!


	2. Worthy Opponent

Bogo was not accustomed to having his time wasted.

Perhaps this owed to the formidable reputation he’d acquired as captain of the Enforcement, a position whose duties he executed with an iron sense of justice which bent for neither sympathy nor bribery. Or perhaps it was his matchless prowess in battle, augmented by softly uttered rumors that he had never suffered injury in a fair duel. Or perhaps it was his indomitable size, or perhaps it was the suit of platinum armour he always wore, or perhaps, just possibly, it was his enormous warhammer, which was eight feet in length from head to haft-end and could crack tempered steel with a single blow.

Any of these traits in isolation would have been enough to strike fear into the heart, and, since he possessed them all, Bogo spent a lot of time striking fear into a lot of hearts. And the fearful are rarely found wasting the time of the fearsome.

So, when he arrived at the regent’s personal chambers for their evening briefing, an appointment Bogo scheduled to the minute, and found the room empty save for a single trembling servant who explained that ‘his Lordship’ was taking afternoon refreshment in the palace gardens and did not wished to be disturbed, there was no docile reaction forthcoming. Instead, his brow furrowed in a murderous stare (which was also good for striking fear into hearts). Then he turned on his hoof so abruptly that it struck sparks off the tile floor, and marched off to find this mammal who was unwisely complicating his schedule.

He was followed closely by his sergeants, Fangmeyer and DelGato, both proven warriors who wore their Enforcement uniforms—polished steel breastplates, black tunics, blue silk sashes —with pride. They were the antithesis to the crass and honourless reprobates who’d come pouring in with the Grey occupation, and who now formed the bulk of the city’s protection. And at that moment they were trading nervous glances; they’d seen Bogo in foul moods before, but his expression now was without precedent, and evidenced a sincere and undiscourageable desire to seize his antagonist by either side of the head and squeeze until their brains came flying out their nostrils.

“Doesn’t wish to be disturbed!” Bogo ranted, turning towards the main stairwell through an archway that his muscular frame filled entirely. “Heaven forfend that the protection of the city interfere with his important business of upending endless pastries into his yawning gob!”

“If I were to guess,” Fangmeyer ventured, “he’ll be talking with Travyse, the general-delegate from Grey’s army.”

“Travyse! By my horns, I curse the day that greasy worm was invited to slither around the palace! Well, I’ll be damned to smouldering hell if I’ll be treated like a common servant by some spoiled, overgrown kitten whose skull only exists to trap empty air!”

“Sir, you oughtn’t speak of the regent so brazenly,” Fangmeyer cautioned. “I know you command the Enforcement, but these days, most of them are loyal to him.”

“Sure. They’re loyal to Lionheart,” Bogo sneered. “But they’re afraid of  _ me _ .”

His anger had not abated by the time he’d stomped to the top of the stairs and emerged onto the palace’s rooftop gardens, a welter of vibrant greenery whose existence in that arid climate was possible only through someone’s persistent and attentive application of horticultural genius, as well as the patronage of some wealthy other who cared nothing for the difficulty of raising healthy plants in the desert so long as there were blooming flowers and green ferns. Endless rows of multicoloured proteas, orchids and flame lilies, their petals unfurled and unblemished under the fearsome equatorial heat, jostled amongst other bushes, grasses and herbs, all suckling on carefully prepared compost in beautifully carved stone gardenbeds. Several slender paths branched away to secluded groves and terraces, perfect settings for the sort of relaxed contemplation that was the privilege of cultural elites. And then, notable above all the other tantalising foliage, there was a series of entwined sycamore figs forming a shady avenue leading to a crystal-water pool where anubias grew and tiny opalescent birds dived and bathed in the shallows.

There, sipping rosewater and consumed in amiable conversation, was the regent of Ashkadod, Lord Leodore Lionheart. The most important, and self-important, mammal in the whole city.

He was, as one might have guessed from his title, extravagantly prosperous, though his finery made such guesses unnecessary.  His robes were fine red silk, worn over an elegant black  _ kaftan  _ embroidered with gold. His fingers were encrusted with rings, each embedded with different precious stones; there was sufficient wealth on his paws alone to purchase a farm and its fertile plot of land twenty-times over. His mane, a bronze cascade around his broad, glib face, glittered with various golden beads and clasps, as if he had carelessly fallen into a jewellery chest and failed to comb the treasures out of his hair. None of this ostentatious adornment, however, could distract, though he dearly wished it to, from his surprising corpulence; while he might have been imposing once, whatever suggestion of physical excellence remaining was completely carpeted under the fat of a lifetime’s idle excess.

The ferret sitting opposite him was not much more worthy of regard. Travyse Blackpaw, Gideon Grey’s most senior general, was a highly skilled and completely ruthless military tactician who had helped his fox lord win and keep lands far beyond the borders of Vulpinstein. However, while his abilities as a military planner had earned him a place at the war-room table, his abilities with a sword were non-existent, and he sought tirelessly to dispel that deficiency through his equipage: a suit of ornate enamelled platemail without so much as a scratch, and a jewel-pomelled sword that was only ever unsheathed to be oiled and sharpened by his sullen squire.

They seemed an unlikely pair, this bloated plutocrat, this snivelling strategist, but they shared some undeniable similarities. They both were driven by an insidious hunger for greater power and respect. They both owed allegiance to a house whose symbol was pinned to their breasts. And they both wore an unpleasant scowl when they saw Bogo and his escorts intruding upon their supper.

“Captain Bogo,” Lionheart said flatly, appraising him with the sort of contemptuous stare that those without true might sometimes summon in the presence of the truly mighty. Fangmeyer and DelGato halted smartly and saluted. Bogo barely deigned to lift his hoof above his waist.

“Regent Lionheart,” Bogo began, “I was expecting to find you in your quarters where I could brief you on the affairs of the moment. I’m assuming you have sound reasons to be instead reclining in the garden, and I’ll further assume that you’re already aware that any time I spend wandering around the palace is time I’m kept from seeing to the maintenance of public order.”

Immediately, and very deliberately, Lionheart’s attention returned to his glass of rosewater. “Is that the entire extent of your gripe?” he sighed, swirling his drink and watching with interest the resulting oily red parabolas inside his cup. “If so, the only one responsible for this poor investment of time is you. There’s absolutely no need for us to meet, given you already have your orders.”

“That’s right!” interjected Travyse, emboldened by Lionheart’s unapologetic tone, and the need to satisfy his own deficit of personal pride. “A fox and a rabbit, en-route to or already inside the city. Their apprehension is of great concern to Lord Grey, and therefore of great concern to yourself.”

Bogo looked at Travyse as if he were an unemptied chamberpot before turning back to Lionheart. “Sir, I know that, by outward appearances, the city seems calm. But there’s a terrible infection lurking beneath its skin, and without constant treatment we’ll find ourselves suddenly overcome with lesions and rot. Drunken lawlessness is on the rise—thirteen brawls in the last fortnight, and nearly all involving off-duty Grey soldiers. The eight deserters from the expeditionary force quelling unrest in Shalpar have not been caught and punished. And, worst of all, there are credible reports that the Sand Sea pirates are on the move and destined for our sphere of concern. The White Queen’s fleet has plundered and sunk five merchant gallions so far; a sixth and others will surely follow unless we do something to stop them. With so much violence and disorder at our doorstep, am I really to invest time and arms to arrest a nameless fox and rabbit who might or might not even be here, and who’ve broken no laws I can name?”

Travyse, who had limited experience with disagreement, began to swell angrily at this, but Lionheart intervened and spared Bogo the ferret’s piping tirade. “Captain, I understand your apprehension perfectly,” he said with a slick, reptilian smile. “You’re a warrior. You have a warrior’s hot blood, just as I do, and you’re itching for a good fight. It’s been many years since I scratched that itch myself. Did I ever tell you of the time we fought the Scorpions, that feared mercenary band? They were deadly warriors, by Nym, even the least of them, but we flattened them into the sand. I disarmed their chieftain in single combat myself, and drove my dagger right through the middle of his brow! What a duel!”

“That must have been a most impressive display of combat finesse,” Travyse remarked.

“Impressive is no word for it,” Lionheart smirked. “It was ever-after known as Skull-Hewer, that dagger. It hangs yet above my mantlepiece—a reminder of glorious days gone by.”

“With respect,” Bogo lied, “this has nothing to do with brute bloodletting. My duty is to protect the city, and that means crushing any threat to its citizens. I do not see how some skulking vulpine and a cuddly bunny constitute any such danger.”

Now it was Lionheart’s turn to inflate with anger, his nostrils gaping as they sucked in great, aggravated breaths. “Your duty,” he said icily, “is to follow orders. You’re bound by oath to serve the city, and that means serving whoever sits on its throne. Which is me. You don’t seem like a traitor to an oath, Bogo…”

“I am no traitor,” Bogo growled.

“Then you had best stop acting like one,” Lionheart snapped, raising a paw to indicate the conversation was over. “There’s no need for you to intrude upon my company again, unless you’re bringing me the two fugitives in fetters, as ordered. Now go—I’m done with you.”

The look on Bogo’s face was pure contempt, but there was nothing to be done. Lionheart was right—the office of Enforcement captain was bound to the regent’s rule, and he would not be the first to break his oath. Once, it had been a secular council that saw to the affairs of state, whose decisions always kept Ashkadod’s best interests in mind, and Bogo had obeyed their mandates without pause or dissonance. Back then, the monarch may well have had the love of his subjects and a vast fortune, but his actual duties were largely ceremonial. 

There was, however, a stipulation in the cities codes of law that the king may seize power directly should the city suffer an emergency: a sweeping outbreak of plague, rebellion in the streets, a hostile invader amassing at the gates. Lionheart had skillfully manipulated this clause and taken absolute power by accusing members of the council of treason, with no plan to reinstate a new committee anytime soon.

Except, Lionheart couldn’t skillfully manipulate anything, for he had the intelligence and guile of a boiled egg. No doubt it was all Travyse whispering in his ear. Without any force to oppose them, a legion of Grey soldiers posing as allies had been admitted through the city gates. Ashkadod had been invaded and yoked to a foreign ruler without so much as a sword drawn. And it was all fault of that gullible, scheming grimalkin.

“Can you believe that sweating mound of lard?!” Bogo fumed once he and his sergeants were safely out of earshot, heading back down the stairs and away from the regent’s nauseating presence. “He can’t so much as open his mouth without an accompanying flood of lies! Slew Nanoch the Deathstalker in single combat?! I’ll bet you the only thing he’s ever skewered on a knifepoint is a roasted yam!”

“I can’t believe we have to salute him,” grumbled DelGato, staring at his paw as if something fowl had been smeared all over it.

“It’s shameful,” Bogo agreed, “when the honourable serve at the pleasure of the honourless. We deserve better.”

But there were no betters to serve; they had become dust, blown away on the currents of history. There were no just causes left to fight for. There were no worthy opponents. Which was all Bogo had ever sought—a worthwhile enemy.

It was but a hundred years ago that Ulf Ironjaw, the kodiak marauder who waded into the fray with a battleaxe in each enormous fist, came down from the Cloudshear Mountains with a wave of brutal ursine raiders at his back; his dominion was not halted until twenty soldiers cornered him alone in a frozen cave, and there were far less than twenty after he was slain. And then there was Merin the Blackbard, who had such a talent for sword and song that it was rumoured he’d bartered his soul to a beautiful demoness for magic paws; his only equal was the high paladin, Sigwyn, who rooted Merin out of his hold-out and engaged him in a duel that started at daybreak and was still going come dusk. And what of Sven Quicktemper, and the Gentle Knight, and Belinda the Bloody Maiden? What of the Oathsworn, and the Blooded Company? What of the Fourteen Martyrs, and the Custodians of the Scales? What had become of all the heroes?

It seemed that, at the very moment Bogo had set foot upon the world, every last one had vanished, and it settled on him again, like an avalanche of wormy gravesoil, that he would waste his entire life waiting for a challenger who was his equal in skill or honour. He would die untested.

“There’s no reward in complaining,” Fangmeyer said, keen to be the voice of concesion. “As long as the Enforcement is polluted by Grey’s garrison, we can’t defy Lionheart’s authority. So, what do we do?”

“The only thing we can do,” Bogo sighed. “We find this rabbit and fox.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I had a ball coming up with all the fantasy history in this chapter. I don't know who Merin and Ulf were, but I bet their stories are pretty interesting. It was also a lot of fun turning Lionheart into a paunchy, petulant usurper, and Bogo into a towering enforcer.
> 
> Travis also makes an appearance...sorry—Travyse. It's odd how some names I simply can not abide in fantasy contexts without a rearrangement of the letters to give it some folkloric gravitas. Judy was the first casually—sorry, but Judy is a name for a crime-solving rabbit, a secretary with big hair...and that's about it. Likewise, Travis has a bit too much redneck on it to make it into a fantasy universe without a Y stapled on.
> 
> Anyway, the stakes are officially raised. You'll have to wait and see how our discordant duo get on with the law bearing down on them...


	3. Good Help is Hard to Come By

The trader was not known for his scruples. In fact, if pressed on the topic, he would have guessed that scruples were some kind of fruit, and then he would have begun scheming ways to corner the scruples market to inflate the price and make a tidy profit.

In short, he was a lowlife.

Part of this was because he was a hyena, a species not held in lofty regard, though this one fell below even those decumbent standards. Mostly, though, it was because he was a swindler, a gouger, a forger and blackmarketeer, and the only mammals who ever sought him out desired to sell merchandise of questionable providence without any tricky questions, such as ‘Why is there blood on it?’

This reputation meant he was largely unhindered in pulling his wheeled cart, loaded up with rolled carpets, past merchants and patrons and other scrutineers, most of whom merely watched with undisguised contempt, muttering about his unfair prices, before returning to their own affairs; there were plenty of other troubles to command the public’s attention, a fact attested to by the ubiquity of Grey banners drooping from every available space, reminding everyone that their city was playing host to a foreign power that hardly had their interest at heart.

None of this bothered the trader, who arrived without incident at his bazaar, an open-faced tent erected inside an alcove on one of Ashkadod’s winding backstreets. He pushed his cart into the secluded space behind his storefront and upended his load of textiles on the floor.

“Oof!” one of the carpets exclaimed.

The trader stowed his cart against the wall and then returned to his peculiarly vocal wares, untying the ropes that cinched them about the middle. The carpets unscrolled, and out popped a rumpled Nick and Judith, like a pair of hapless beetles trapped in a flower’s clenched petals at night and emerging stunned in the morning bloom.

“I did say you’d be entering undercover, not in comfort,” the trader remarked with a snicker.

Nick got to his feet and attempted to compose his cheek fur, which was pointing straight up. “That ought to be ‘undercovers’ I guess,” he muttered.

“The next time I travel anywhere,” Judith declared, trying to straighten a kink out of her ear, “it will be in sumptuous comfort.” Then she turned to the trader, saying, “Five gold coins was the agreed price, right?”

“Five gold coins is a good start,” laughed the trader. “And it’s five more if you want me to keep my mouth shut.”

Judith looked at the trader the way a gardener looks at weeds—as something irritating, thorny, and utterly expected. His services had been necessary; once Judith had seen the dreaded Grey banners snaking in the wind at the city’s perimeter, she’d known it would be unsafe to pass through the main gate, where a gang of customs officers berated defenceless travellers, inventing taxes as suited them and, worst of all, recording the name and species of each arrival in a set of voluminous ledgers. They did not want to leave such evidence anywhere Gideon held sway. So, Nick had scoured the tents and caravans surrounding the city until he found someone willing to smuggle them incognito—someone, obviously, of disreputable stamp, who knew that no-one wants to creep by guards for an honest reason. She was merely annoyed with herself for being surprised that such a delinquent would fail to honour the settled terms.

“Of course,” she sighed wearily, thrusting her paw into her increasingly anorexic coinpurse. “I’ve just come from a part of the world saturated with liars and cheats. Why on earth did I imagine it would be different in some other part of the world?”

The hyena shrugged. “Maybe you’re not very smart. Now hand it over.”

Judith thrust the five gold, plus their five insolently-bargained siblings, into the hyena's outstretched paw, then snatched up her belongings and departed into the crowd without another word. Once Nick had persuaded his cheekfur to stay level, he gathered his rucksack and hurried after her.

“He’s right—you’re not very smart,” Nick remarked, elbowing his way through the throng. “He’ll give us up at the first chance of a profit. Now, I know you’ll complain if I suggest we cut his throat, bur we should at least club him in the jaw so he cant speak.”

“That’s not necessary,” Judith muttered. “He’s not going to give us up.”

“No?” Nick scoffed. “The hyena isn’t going to cross us? There’s a saying about his kind—‘If you find yourself in a room with a hyena, and someone else who is actively trying to stab your face...keep your eye on the hyena.”

“Who says that?” Judith demand.

“Everyone. It’s an old saying. Old as the hills. Hyenas aren't to be trusted.”

“You’d think a fox would know better than to stereotype other species,” Judith grumbled, turning down a narrow alley to escape the overcrowded street; the lively throng either did not see a mammal of her slight size, or simply didn’t care, and she’d nearly been squashed underfoot several times already. “Look, any information he could give up would also be an admission of breaking the law. It doesn’t seem clever to confess that you’re a smuggler to guards who’ll immediately arrest you. And even if he does decide the likelihood of a reward outweighs the chance of being tossed into a cell, what exactly has he got to disclose? That a rabbit and a fox are in the city?”

“A rabbit with three scars on her cheek,” Nick clarified. “And the most handsome fox in all the realms. If this Lord Gideon wants you, that’s more than enough to pick us out of a crowd. I say we go back and rattle his teeth.”

“I forbid it. And another thing,” Judith added, pausing to jab a cautionary finger into Nick’s belly, “the whole point of sneaking in was to avoid arousing suspicion, which is not a goal well-served by you starting fights with the locals. As long as we’re here, we take every care—every care, do you hear me?—to avoid being noticed. Got that?

Nick’s hyperbolic nod and disingenuous smile was all the answer she got.

They emerged from the alleyway into an enormous market-square, where the declining daylight was doing nothing to slow down business. From endless rows of particoloured tents, merchants hoarsely cried the quality of their fabrics, produce and metalwork, while a number of exotic spices—mint, chili, cardamom, cumin—was blended into a mouth-watering symphony by a teeming orchestra of cooks, boiling cauldrons of stock or swirling rice in deep-bellied pans. Amidst this tumult of trade moved mammals of every kind and class, from harried natives in unbleached cotton  _ keffiyeh  _ to harsh-countenanced warriors wearing cured leather peeled off the desert skinks, an odd assortment of weapons swinging from their hips: crescent-shaped swords and barbed scythes and axes weighted with heavy blocks of marble. Scattered throughout this outlandish ensemble were helms and pauldrons of western smithing, worn by mercenaries from distant lands drawn by the promise of work, honest or otherwise. There were too many species to count, native camels, rhinos and wildebeest brushing shoulders with wolves and bears, while tiny mice and mongeese slunk and skittered under their feet. And all of them were brought together here, despite their discrepant creeds and cultures, despite embittered feuds and fissures, by the overriding urge to make money.

Ignoring the suspicious looks from vendors, looks warranted when encountering a black-clad dagger-sporting fox, Nick was delighted browsing the stalls, staring with rapt glee at the arsenals of maces, spears and blades. “Get an eyeful of these,” he said, fawning over some beautiful silver  _ khanjars _ , gauging whether it was wise to reach out and touch them, or if that would earn him a rap across the knuckles from the stern-eyed merchant. “I’ve heard all sorts of talk about Askadodian metalcraft; looks like not all of it was lies. What do you think a brace of these beauties would set me back?”

It suddenly dawned on him that he was talking to himself, and he whirled about until he spotted Judith a few tents down bartering with a tailor, a small and potbellied hyrax with a glazed look of permanent nonchalance. She was holding up her cloak to study the chevron-shaped tear that ran from its shoulder to the middle of the cape, while Judith looked on with nervous expectation. This weathered skein of purple fabric had acquired too much significance for Judith to be flippant about its fettle: it was a mark of her warrior heritage; it was a link to her murdered kin; it was the reminder of why her task must be taken seriously, if only by herself.

“Can you fix it?” Judith asked.

The tailor snorted, vacuuming a gout of snot back into her sinus. “One hour,” she said. “Ten coppers.”

“It’s a family heirloom,” Judith added hastily as she tipped the copper coins into the hyrax’s palm. “It’s....really all I have to remember them by. You’ll treat it with care, right?”

The tailor swept Judith’s payment into a dusty wooden coffer, and then, oblivious to her customer’s alarmed expression, tossed the rabbit’s cape over her shoulder onto a pile of tattered garments likewise awaiting needle and thread.

“I have other work to do first,” the tailor said with a shrug.

Judith simply stared at her, contemplating briefly the likelihood of success if she demanded her clothes and payment back, before she turned and bumped into Nick who was standing right behind her.

“I don’t know that you’re leaving your ‘family heirloom’ in the best of care,” he joked. “And is that really your most prized possession? A scrap of purple cloth? It’s just as well your tribe left you some priceless magic stones as well, or you’d probably feel cheated.”

“Would you shut your muzzle?” Judith hissed. “You keep that to yourself. And don’t talk about—”

Suddenly her eyes doubled in size and she leaped forward, tackling Nick off his feet and into rack of woven tapestries.

“What the hell has gotten into you?” Nick snarled, trying to push her aside. “You have got to grow some thicker skin—”

Judith clamped his jaw shut with one paw and hushed him with the other, and when he finally deigned to follow her instructions, she pointed over his head at the source of her panic.

Standing at the main thoroughfare, watching the crowd narrowly from under the brims of their kettle helms and clutching spears with grey pennants trailing from their hafts, was the Enforcement.

Nick looked at the guards, and then turned back to Judith.

“For that, you throw me into a shelf of rugs?”

“I didn’t want them to see us,” she whispered.

“Of course. You want to avoid suspicion, so you tackle your partner into someone’s storefront. Now we’re attracting no attention whatsoever.”

By now, the merchant had spotted them and came over to shout and gesticulate about the interference with his merchandise. Judith got to her feet and did a completely unsatisfactory job of rearranging the merchant’s rack. “We have to get out of here,” she hissed.

“God’s Scrote, you act as if they’re actively looking for you,” Nick sighed. “We’re nobodies to them, unless there’s another stall you want to kick over while they’re watching.”

“If we go back the way we came,” Judith said, staring down the street as her mind raced, “we can loop back around and follow one of those alleyways to a main street. Come on. If we’re quick—”

Then she realised she was standing there alone, and it didn’t take long for her to spot Nick’s swishing black cape and copper tail bobbing nonchalantly out into the open road, right past the Enforcement. Her fingers almost disappeared down her throat in sheer terror, convinced the guards would have him by the scruff of the neck in a heartbeat, and she would shortly follow. But if they thought anything of the cowled fox they kept it to themselves; they kept it so well, in fact, that Nick actually brushed against the nearest one, and then, once behind them, tossed an object in the air which turned out to be (she almost swallowed her arms to the elbow) the guard’s coinpurse. The money vanished into the folds of his tunic before, with a huge wink in Judith’s direction, the felonious fox strolled down the street, through an archway and out of view.

All Judith could think was, gods be her witness, one day she would slap the smug right off his face.

 

—

 

“What the hell was that?” she demanded angrily later when she had, by a tangle of backallies, circumvented the same guards Nick had so brazenly robbed and caught him up in a low and scabrous part of the city. It under the control of the Baltagiya, one of several unsavoury criminal outfits that ran Ahskadod’s underworld, who evidently cared very little about improving the condition or safety of the streets, so naturally beggars leered from its shadows, wastrels slept wherever darkness found them, and half-naked orphans stared covetously on their cloaks and clothes, shade and warmth enough to keep both brutal sun and merciless midnight at bay.

“Just making a point,” Nick said.

“Making a point indeed! You nearly made several, if you mean the points of swords drawn from sheathes.”

Nick stifled a laugh. “And yet here we are, safe and unpricked. There’s nothing in the world you need to fear less than incompetent guards.”

He may have had a point; their eyes, it seemed, had not been not narrowed in suspicion so much as sleepy with boredom, and they had been clutching their spears because they were too drunk to stand straight without a crutch. Even so, to risk the law’s fury by pinching the purse right off its belt was as rash an action as Judith could imagine.

“So this is the sum of all your worldly experience? You know how to brush with the law and slip off before they can put you in chains?”

“It’s not something I know,” Nick said, feigning indignation. “It’s in my blood. The law has never placed a pair of shackles on me, and they never will.”

“Well, make certain your wrists stay unbound,” Judith sighed, suddenly unwilling to carry on the argument. “The sun is down, but I think we should take care of what we came here for and gather some intelligence; the sooner we can get out of this nest of Grey vipers, the better. We’ll meet back here in a couple of hours.”

“Back...here?” Nick asked, looking around to absorb the details. It was not a pleasant quarter, with wary-eyed scoundrels stalking the streets and towering, close-set buildings creating lethal alleys brimming with shadow, where even the cut-throats were afraid of having their throats cut. Even by these horrid standards the tavern Judith was suggesting they should return to was remarkably deformed, cobbled together from loose sandstone and sun-bleached acacia, its facade dominated by a lop-sided cylindrical tower topped with weather-split tiles and encircled by a wooden awning like some bizarre timber skirt. There was no ‘Cracked Tankard’ or ‘Smith’s Arms’ here; hanging by the door was a simple wooden sign proclaiming ‘Inn’. In front of this, some witty scrivener had written ‘Don’t Go.”

“Is there something wrong with here?” Judith asked.

“It looks like the offspring of two buildings who didn’t realise they were siblings…”

“Yes. So no-one will think of looking for us here,” she explained, feeling no need to add that it looked very cheap, and at the rate things were going, her finances needed all the reinforcements they could get. “I can feel the Tooth’s pull from somewhere on the sea, so I’m going to go digging for places out there where it might have landed. Meanwhile, I want you to go to the docks and see what it costs to hire a skiff—the cheapest one you can get that won’t disintegrate in a strong breeze.”

“I’m a knife-for-hire,” Nick complained, paws on his hips. “Isn’t bartering for a boat beneath me?”

“No,” said Judith dryly. “I’d say that ruthlessly haggling for the leanest price is right up your duplicitous alley.”

Nick’s eyes wrinkled in amusement. “Alright. But watch your back. Remember—you’ve got a couple of priceless treasures on you, and you never know what sort of low bandits might be about…”

“I’ll take care,” Judith murmured as she turned and walked off, pondering that the only low bandit that was cause for concern had been following her around for months now. She was glad that, for once in this prolonged journey, she had the option of abandoning Nick for a while when his attitude began to rasp her nerves. Even in the market’s frantic hubbub, the absence of his constant acerbic wittering was blissful relief, and, as she slunk away through the crowd’s scuffling knees and boots, she found herself fantasising about throwing Nick out of her company and continuing by herself in heavenly silence.

Lucky for him, she supposed, that she needed a competent guardian more than she needed solitude. Good help was hard to come by.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'd forgotten how much fun it is to write this pair, with Nick's rapid-fire wit bouncing back off Judy's dry, sarcastic temper. Trying to write a witty character into a narrative, however, can be difficult; I find I often have to dream up a play on words and then write the scenario around it, which is a lot easier than developing a situation and then scratching your head over how a character could be clever in that context. The other thing I wanted, and which is a major goal of mine in bringing this fantasy locale to life, is giving it the feel of a city under occupation. If you want to give your story layers, it seems a good idea to have some seismic events underway at new settings, so that your town hasn't just been sitting there, doing nothing like a prop on a stage, waiting for your protagonists to show up and kick off the action.
> 
> By the way, for you history geeks who like to know what the obscure references are to, Baltagiya is an Egyptian word meaning 'goons' or 'thugs', and was about the closest thing I could find for middle-eastern variant of 'gangster'.


	4. Other Sorcery

Judith might have followed the intersecting backroads deeper into the trade quarter, where lay a profusion of inns and stables where talk was cheap. However, while taverns were good places to find rumors and information, they were also good places to find hearsay and deceit, and better places to find drunkards, thugs and cutpurses, too. 

So, instead, Judith turned onto Ashkadod’s principal thoroughfare, the Street of a Thousand Fires, a yawning avenue that carried traffic from the main gate to the other side of the city. It was, in the astonishing fashion of eastern antiquity, not entitled hyperbolically, and every twenty yards boasted a huge marble bowl borne aloft on the shoulders of various kneeling statues, all different species, all bowed in supplication. Roaring flames cracked and spat in each basin, and by the toil of an army of fire-keepers these behemoth braziers upset the order of day and night, keeping the street under the spell of artificial sunlight until the genuine article arose on the eastern horizon.

Endless traffic surged through this nightlong candescence, including enormous merchant wagons piled high with every kind of cargo imaginable and drawn by as many as eight clicker beetles yoked into clanking traces, around which swarmed numberless pedestrians, brushing against these swaying, swift-moving carriages with a terrifying lack of interest in their personal safety, all but stepping through the spokes of the carriages’ wheels. It seemed that everyone’s first concern was the obligations of their afterdark business, their own wellbeing second, and everyone else’s third. Judith kept to the thinner traffic at the road’s, edge where the danger of being flattened by boots or wheels was least, and kept her eyes peeled for any stalking untoward sorts; the presence of so much firelight meant this was also the Street of a Thousand Shadows. 

Before long, she found the junction she was searching for and turned left into a narrow alley, the walls so close that an upstairs resident could put one leg out their window and step directly into their neighbour’s. Some orphans were playing in the street, rolling peachstones along the gutter, presided over by a lank soothsayer clutching a crooked staff crowned with a withy wreath, small skulls hanging from it like baubles and some commandment or condemnation scrawled in homebrewed ink across a wooden plank. He was leering at the children, his intentions impossible to define, though when Judith drew near he turned his oversized and blood-speckled eyes on her.

“You walk knowingly to false messiahs, do you?” he snarled, shaking his colluvious standard at her. “Do you have no shame?”

“No, but I do have two swords,” she warned, and the streetpriest withdrew his staff, if not his judgemental stare. She walked past him and emerged from the alley into a large circular plaza—the religious quarter. Where every priest or priestess worthy of note kept their sanctuary. A hub of alsm, psalms and magic charms. A congregation of congregations.

In truth, Judith was taking a leaf out of Nick’s book; while information could be squeezed out of a rumour-merchant over drinks, the acolytes of a hospitable faith were often more forthcoming, and usually didn’t expect to be  paid a small pile of coins and a tankard of ale for the trouble. She had no doubt that she could find such kindly practitioners here.

They would not most likely be found, however, amongst the fine-robed clergy who worshiped Nym, the three-headed patron god of this desert city, whose golden synagogue, with its filigree stonework and deputation of marble caryatids keeping the ornate entablature aloft, rose high above the other shrines, temples and churches. This ostentatious appearance was apparently insufficient to remind the other faiths of Nym’s primacy, and the temple’s entrance was guarded by a huge gold statue of Nym himself, whose triumvirate head—a rhinoceros for strength, an elephant for knowledge, a lion for nobility—surveyed the whole plaza with condescending tolerance. The sculptor responsible had gone to great lengths to ensure this deity's superiority; he was a mighty eighteen feet from top to toe, girded with swollen muscles, and possessing an eye-watering bulge of near comedic overcompensation beneath his modest loincloth. If she’d gone bowing and petitioning before these wealthy worshipers, she figured she’d be turned around and tossed out just as if she were a rabid mongrel with foam 

Instead, she ambled through the crowd, looking for a sect she could name, wondering at the sheer variety of practitioners, some bowed in silent prayer, some shrieking hoarsely about coming apocalypses, some garbed in cotton robes, some caked with anointed clay and very little besides. Finally, she spotted a temple of modest artifice whose symbol she recognised—a circle encompassing a series of intersecting lines. The house of the Pyrolaters.

It was a sect she had read of in Roor-Shala’s library’s encyclopaedias, a fire-cult who believed that all warmth—body, fire, sun—evidenced a benevolent creator, and, if she recalled right, were pacifists in nature. With an assured nod, she pressed through the morass of preachers and pilgrims, and slipped through the temple’s curtained doorway.

Ironically, it was very dark inside. It took Judith’s eyesight a few moments to adjust, and she realised she was standing at the end of a corridor made of black, igneous stones. The air was hot and cloying with ash. Orange light flickered at the end of the hallway, indicating a corner, from around which emanated a chorus of whispered chanting. Swallowing a knot of nerves in her throat, Judith walked towards it.

Around the corner lay an open room, sinister darkness lurking at its periphery, a towering bonfire blazing at its core, snarling like a leashed beast as it spat a great shaft of cinders and smoke into a chimneymouth recessed in the roof overhead. Silhouetted before the infernal light were dark shapes bowing at the edge of the firepit, muttering some illegible incantation in sibilant tones, bizarre penitents in commune with an elemental force whose only apparent language was the snap of charring wood.

Judith frowned at the strange spectacle and moved to intrude upon their worship when a paw clasped her tightly on the shoulder, making her reel about in surprise. But it was simply one of the cult’s acolytes, a polecat in a mottled-orange robe who peered at Judith with wary courtesy.

“ _ Manashi _ ,” the ashwitch said in a language foreign to Judith, releasing the rabbit’s shoulder so she could bow in greeting with palms pressed. “My name is Lunia, humble servant of Shamla, Lord of the Sun, He Who Breathes Warmth and Life.”

“Judith,” Judith replied, feeling slightly inadequate by comparison.

“And what, dear thing, brings you to our temple? Are you one amongst the faithful, come to give thanks for Shamla’s infinite generosity?”

For a moment, Judith balked. She had planned to pass herself off as ‘one amongst the faithful’ to curry some cooperation, but something in the polecat’s bright eyes warned that she was suspicious of lies, that such a counterfeiting would be tested and exposed as treacherous.

The truth, then. Or, at least, a small dose of it.

“No,” Judith admitted. “I am not. My home is many miles away from here, and I have never heard the name Shamla before. Nevertheless, I was told this is a place I could seek answers. You see, I have lately felt this strange...impulse, an inclination to wander, seeking a destination I can not yet name.”

“Hmm,” said Lunia with a shrug. “Who has not felt such desires before?”

Judith shook her head. “It’s not mere wanderlust. It has greater presence than that. It’s like a pair of invisible paws on my back, pushing me, guiding me. Some days it even feels like a voice in my ear. And always it compels me to venture that way.” She pointed east to where, beyond the walls and harbours of the city, lay the vast white ocean of sand.

For a moment Lunia simply stared at her, eyes widening as if witness to a miracle. “The Great Sand Sea?” she breathed. “A voice commands you travel beyond the Great Sand Sea?”

Judith’s heart skipped a beat. “What is out there?” she asked.

Lunia did not answer; instead, breaking into an elated grin, she seized Judith by the wrist and lead her briskly across the slate floor. “This is exciting news!” she exclaimed joyfully, though her fellow acolytes, apparently consumed with their abasement before the flames, paid not the slightest attention. “A blessing! A sign from Shamla! Come, and I will instruct you upon the task that the Lord of the Sun has entrusted to you.”

Nervous but unresisting, Judith allowed herself to be pulled towards the shadow-clouded wall, which revealed itself to be a series of archways. Lunia guided her through one such aperture into a space as dark as pitch, where Judith could see nothing save the glimmer of the polecat’s eyes like a pair of glowing coals. There was a momentary spark of flint against iron before the room was bathed in the soft light of a lantern. It had the constricted dimensions of a dungeon cell, with just enough space for two occupants, a pair of stone slab benches to sit on, and a table of similar fashion on which sat an empty brass bowl with eldritch imprimatur stenciled around its rim.

“It is no matter of luck that you found this place,” Lunia said, fixing the lantern to a hook from a joist overhead. “I believe that Shamla himself has elected you as a champion to do his bidding. This is a great honour...oh, forgive me,” she apologized, seeing the blank look on Judith’s face. “You are untutored in the way of the Lord of the Sun. Judith, Samla is the one true god, a god with many forms and faces. All who bow before any idol—any at all, even that hideous gold statue of Nym—unknowingly pledge their reverence to Shamla.”

“Your gods is all gods?” Judith asked, trying her best not to sound dismissive, for she had heard such theology before and it struck an ill chord with her, apostate though she was; you did not have to keep any particular deity sacred to see the disdain and danger in someone claiming that all worship was actually their own.

“Our god is all gods,” Lunia agreed. “You may not know him, Judith, but you know his work: it is the heat of your body, it is the warmth of a blazing hearth, it is the searing of the midday sun. Heat, in all its forms and guises—that is his gift, and its absence would render the world a sterile waste. Yet, through many regrettable failures and neglects, the mammals of the world have forgotten Shamla’s name and power. They charge his radiant gift to some other account, or worse, think nothing of the sustaining sun and concern themselves wholly with their own satisfaction. This imbalance needs rectifying. This is the destiny to which our hallowed lord is calling you.”

“What has this to do with the Great Sand Sea?”

“Once, thousands of years ago, our greatest temple was the Sunspire, erected in one of the few places where, from the first breath of dawn light to the last sigh of dusk, one can turn their eyes to the sky and see the sun.”

“How did a species in some distant era build a temple in the middle of a sea?” Judith asked in tones of frank disbelief that Lunia mistook for startled awe.

“This is, unfortunately, not known to us,” she confided sadly. “What is known is that the temple was abandoned and lapsed into ruin, striking the very heart of our faith numb. Ever since, the order, and its membership, has been in slow decline.”

“So Shamla’s will,” Judith said, now piecing together the polecat’s intent, “is that I should go find this dilapidated temple and somehow restore it to its former glory? Why me? Are none amongst Shamla’s current faithful equal to the task?”

Lunia shook her head. “We have not been called as you have. For as you say, none of us are equal to the task, and I’ve yet to tell you what drove our priests from that sacred place, never to return.”

Judith wondered if it was the realisation that the sun would continue on its orbit without constant encouragement from a bamboozled sect of fire-worshipers.

“We have only scraps of the tale,” continued Lunia in a ghost-story whisper, “and they tell of some nameless, tyrannical evil that befell Sunspire—of eight twisting serpentine bodies and venom caustic enough to turn adamant stone into running liquid. What remains of our order is peaceful; we’d never stand a chance before beasts such as these. But a blooded warrior…”

“So, Shamla needs a champion to clear his home of snakes, and he found me…”

“This is an honour I can scarcely describe,” said Lunia, her eyes alight with a gleam of utter certainty common to the religious. “Think of how the world will appear when you have smote the evil from that most holy place. Scores will seek out our congregation once more, Shamla will be installed in his rightful place above his gaudy imposters...and your name will be etched forever in the annals of history.”

Judith wasn’t listening. She wasn’t even slightly interested in the idea that some scholar a hundred years hence would open a tome and see her credited as the rescuer of some stagnating religion. She already knew what voice beckoned her from beyond the white horizon; this Sunspire sounded exactly like the sort of secluded bastion where one of the Teeth might set down. And these eight anguine beasts with poisoned fangs sounded exactly like the sort of guardians a Tooth would yoke to its will.

At last, she had a name for her destination.

She was thinking of ways she could disentangle herself from this earnest devotee sitting opposite her so she could go find Nick and be on her way when Lunia reached out and clasped her paws. “Before you commence this great ordeal, you must allow me to read your future. To do other would be starting without Shamla’s blessing, inviting the worst luck to plague your every step.”

A groan welled up in Judith’s throat, thought she managed to dam it behind her teeth. Of course there was magic in this world—she carried evidence of that around her neck—but the idea that this strange, orange-clad acolyte could divine her fate by calling on the power of a sungod was pure delusion, and one keeping her from her true purpose. Still, unwilling to give offence, she nodded and watched as Lunia, grinning ecstatically, reached below the bench and produced a hessian tote filled with woodchips which she tipped into the empty bowl. Then, eyes closed in solemnity, she lit a piece of matchwood on the lanternflame and lay it atop the vessel’s heaped contents.

At once the bowl burst into a brilliant roil of flame, so dazzling in its candescence that Judith recognised the fuel as shaved emberwood. Intoning some whispered incantation, Lunia scattered something else into the bowl, whereupon the the flames suddenly turned blood-red, and over this crimson conflagration she muttered and gestured like one possessed.

When the fire had burned down to nothing, Lunia swept a finger through the remaining calx and asked Judith to open her paws, which she did. The ashwitch painted a circle in still-warm powder on both her palms, then clasped them together, still hissing under her breath. 

Judith was both astonished and irritated by the length these cultists were willing to go in the name of ceremony. But she was more astonished than irritated when Lunia’s eyes snapped open, fixed at some point on the ceiling behind Judith’s head. Her irises were suddenly vivid red.

“Shamla favours you with a vision,” she gasped, squeezing Judith’s paws ever tighter. “A prophecy that will come to pass as surely as those things already etched in history. He says...someone will betray you.”

Judith glanced nervously from the oracle’s ferocious grip to her demonic gaze. “Someone?” she asked.

Lunia’s eyes rolled in her skull.

“The fox.”

“The fox?”

“Nick. He will betray you. And then, you will watch him die.”

Despite the heat in that confined stone room, Judith felt a startling chill creep down her vertebrae. The thought of Nick’s brittle loyalty had been on her mind of late, and to hear her companion accurately identified by a complete stranger surely indicated something beyond guesswork. How on earth could she have known? And what on earth did this oracle mean that Judith would  _ watch him die?  _

It suddenly struck Judith that the warmth in the room was escalating. Her palms were hot, very hot, hot enough to be burning. She tried to snatch them away but Lunia wouldn’t let them go, and then, on the verge of shrieking in protest, Judith saw that the diviner’s ruby gaze was directly upon her, and every trace of favour once there was gone and supplanted by bitterness and reproach.

At last the polecat released her, and Judith yanked her paws away, expecting to see blackened fur and charred flesh, and instead a faint red glow where the glyphs had been traced.

“Shamla has other things to say,” Lunia hissed. “You are a pretender, cowled in false piety, come to cheat information from us with fraudulent claims.”

Judith was on her feet now, her paw tracing the grip of her sword, eyes locked on that sinister sanguine gaze. “You can read my mind?” she gasped.

“Go!” Lunia spat, canines flashing under her curled lip. “Shamla will not suffer a deciever amongst his flock! Go, and know that the Lord foresees nothing but death and treachery in your future! You can no more avoid it than you can blow out the light of the sun!”

Judith fled that small cell, passing back through the central room where, she saw with a terrified start, the blaze in the firepit had turned red too, bright red, bright as arterial blood, and each bowed devotee was now on their feet, a gang of insidious shadows before the rubicond light, each watching and judging her heresy with utmost contempt, with scorn forewarning violence.

By the time Judith had slipped outside through the temple’s canvas door her heart was knocking on her ribs like the hammer on a balafon, and she sucked in great breaths of dusty air to fight down her nausea, drawing away from the shrine’s entrance as if it were the befanged maw of a hungry monster.

What by gods had she just witnessed in there? What had she heard? 

_ Who  _ had she heard?

The polecat’s lips. The polecat’s tongue. But some other voice entirely. And that placed her in a new and worrying position. It was not just the magic of the Teeth she had to contend with. There was other sorcery in the world. There were other sources of power.

And they were telling her….what? That Nick would pull a blade in the dark and try to slip it between her ribs? That she would strike him down and coat the ground with his blood?

The sun had fallen by now. The sky was black. It was time to go. And yet Judith stood rooted in place, unable to budge, a clew of troubling thoughts worming in the matter of her brain, until she finally remembered herself and headed back to her rendezvous.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know I have a habit of delving into the bottomless basement of the thesaurus, but that’s actually being charitable, because this time I found a word so obscure that it’s not even there. It’s colluvies, and it’s an utterly precious word meaning a ‘collection of foulness’. Now, I’m sorry, but the frequency with which I need to assert not only that there is an assortment of things, but also that all the things are repulsive, demands that this term be better know. Who has not encountered a bain-marie full of deepfried food in a late-night service station, for example?
> 
> Anyway, I took it a step further and coined the neologism ‘colluvious’ since it suited my purpose, and it got me thinking - should a run-of-the-mill author like myself be minting new words? Isn’t it the height of hubris to assume readers will care for your attempt to inject fresh blood into the language, when it’s already full to bursting? I think I’m OK in this instance, since it’s only a neglected form of an already existing noun. And creations like ‘paw-kerchief’, where it’s really clear what train of logic you’ve followed, add a nice layer of verisimilitude. Let me know where you stand on the issue; I don’t want my writing to become wamberfacious, after all.


	5. The Pleasure of Your Company

The ashwitch’s words were still whirling about in Judith’s head when she returned to the Inn and saw Nick already there waiting for her. He’d never exactly looked a portrait of trustworthiness, but now, after the oracle’s malevolent prophecy, he looked positively evil, the sort of sinister figure one might conjure is following them on a solitary midnight walk.

“There you are,” he said as she approached. “I thought I was going to have to wait forever to show off my new effects.” He thrust out his chest, and Judith realised that his simple and utilitarian throwing daggers had been replaced by a gleaming new set whose hilts were styled as windswept eagles in mid-dive, whose blades looked sharp enough to carve bone like curd.

Judith stared at him warily, though he could not have guessed that her tart temperament owed to those words in Lunia’s sybillant warning—‘betrayal’ and ‘death’. Not that it surprised him; in the course of their partnership, he’d given her an unlimited stockpile of reasons be cross with him.

“How much did they cost you?”

Nick drew one of the blades and spun it dexterously between his fingers, grinning like a mischievous kit. “Let’s just say they settled for a steep discount,” he chuckled.

Judith looked even less impressed, if such a feat was possible. “We’re lacking for food, supplies and good information, and he goes steals daggers. Why do you need more daggers? You have enough daggers.”

“There’s no such thing as too many daggers,” he said, returning the knife to its leather sheath. “In fact, I think I might start a collection of fine weapons. It’ll give me something to do to offset your unlimited tediousness…”

Judith pushed through the tavern doors, praying that inside his prattling would be drowned out by other conversations. She was not disappointed in this regard, for the place was crammed wall-to-wall with the sort of crass, boisterous patrons who didn’t mind spending their time in such a dishevelled-looking establishment. Most were sitting before huge mugs of beer or glasses of pungent arrak, telling stories or proposing toasts at the sort of deafening volume appropriate for a pitched battle. Here and there gamblers sat hunched over queer games of chance, the stakes various piles of odd-sorted coins and glistening gems. Less wholesome engagements were conducted in the abundant shadows, for the principal light came from a solitary hearthfire at the far end of the room where the cook, a grim-looking boar—he seemed to have come by the position not for any gustatory talent, but rather by drawing a short lot—toiled sullenly over his blackened pots next to a seated mistral who was cross-eyed drunk and appeared to be playing his lute upside-down. Above them all, upon the beams and rafters, a tableaux of the revelry below was repeated in miniature by a rowdy mass of rats and mice seated at tiny tables, laughing in tiny voices and spilling tiny drinks on the morass of drunkards below.

Nick stepped in beside Judith and grinned at the debauchery. “What a lively place,” he said.

“Yeah,” Judith muttered. “Like a flyblown corpse, it’s lively.”

They made their way to the counter where the innkeeper, a rotund sow, had entrenched herself like a soldier behind embattled ramparts. She had the most fiercely sour disposition either of them had ever seen, and looked as if she equated smiling with behind being grotesquely ill.

“My good wench,” Nick began unhelpfully, “I’m looking for something very cheap and strong enough to dislocate my esophagus. Can you help?”

Evidently, conversation was a symptom of the same medical disorder; the sow drew him a pint of potent, chunky ale in contemptuous silence, took his money, and arched an eyebrow at Judith.

“Uh...carrot juice and a bowl of stew. And a room as well, thank you.”

The sow’s ample brow wrinkled, and she nodded questioningly at Nick.

“Oh, of course. We’re sharing, aren’t we darling? The honeymoon suite?”

“A room for  _ one, _ ” Judith clarified sharply, taking the appropriate fare from her purse and pressing it on the countertop hard enough to stamp an impression in the wood.

They took their purchases and descended into the seethe of bizarrely athletic drinking, of tankards swinging back and forth like pendulums in time with bawdy songs and inebriated patrons sliding off chairs and onto the floor. They were looking for a relatively quiet spot where they could trade their findings and plan their next move; however, they’d no sooner parked themselves at the only bench with spare seats when one of their new drinkmates, a filthy red-eyed weasel, turned slowly to face them with a rancorous stare.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” he hissed.

“Oh, my apologies—you must be very thick,” Nick replied. “It would be clear to anyone with even a spoonful of brains that we’re sitting down to enjoy some beverages.”

Judith shot Nick an alarmed look of warning; they were supposed to be keeping a low profile, and this weasel had two very large companions.

For a moment the weasel simply stared at Nick before a misanthropic, yellow-toothed grin split his rugous muzzle. “Now isn’t this strange, Jarak, Scab,” he sneered, motioning to his brace of drinking buddies, a tawny camel and a rhino with a saltire scar dividing his eyes. “Looks like we’ve run into that rarest of entities—a smart-mouthed fox. Well, fleabag, this is our table, and smart-mouthed foxes, and the friends of smart-mouthed foxes, aren’t welcome to share it. Isn’t that right, boys?”

Jarak and Scab’s mean scowls confirmed that this was correct.

“Wait a moment,” Judith said hurriedly, begging for calm with outstretched paws. “There’s no cause for conflict. We’ll find somewhere else to sit.” But no-one heard her, least of all Nick, who was squinting at their antagonists with inflammatory contempt.

“The table isn’t your property, you overgrown gerbil, and I don’t appreciate that I need an invitation to sit at it. Just who do you think you are?”

The weasel stood up on his chair so he was at eye-level with Nick and puffed out his chest. “I’m Duke Weaselton the Third, leader of the Baltagiya,” he declared. “And we  _ do _ own this table. We own every Nym-forsaken table in this quarter of the city. And I don’t want you rubbing your rump on any of them. Now I’m not going to ask you again; turn around and skulk out that door, or there’s going to be trouble.” And then, so that all parties involved understood exactly what ‘trouble’ meant, Weaselton drew a long dagger and jammed it threateningly into the boards of the tabletop.

An uneasy quiet descended on the immediate vicinity. Jokes and stories were suspended mid-syllable. The spoon in the stewpots ceased stirring. The bard’s fingers paused over the strings of his lute. All eyes were locked on the figures around the table staring one another down with naked bloodlust, here and there wagers already laid over who would emerge victorious, over who would be first to die. The rhino had an enormous hardwood club drawn, and the camel’s hooves flexed over the handles of his two swords. Just waiting. Waiting for the cue.

Then Nick burst into laughter.

The murder drained out of the troublemakers’ faces, replaced with uncertainty and bamboozlement as their intended victim doubled over in hysterics. Even Judith looked completely bewildered, as if Nick had just proposed to be a large plate of beans.

“Oh goodness,” Nick chortled, brushing away tears with a finger. “That was supposed to be a threat, wasn’t it? That was supposed to intimidate me.”

Shock, pure and simple, spread across Weaselton’s face. For it was inarguable that the verbose vulpine was about two seconds from being eviscerated and pulverised by Weasleton’s amply muscled co-ruffians...although it was equally inarguable that the dagger, sunk into the tabletop, wasn’t much good to the weasel for killing. And then, before either side could directly point out these merits and flaws, Nick added, “ _ This  _ is how you intimidate someone,” and he reached across the table, grabbed Weaselton by the scruff of his neck, and slammed his head into the boards.

The weasel slithered off his seat and landed in an unconscious pile on the floor, one chipped tooth clattering across the flagstones. Jarak and Scab’s eyes grew even wider, boggling in their skulls as they swivelled from their stricken leader to the fox responsible.

“Now  _ that _ ,” Nick said, “was intimidating.”

The spell of their enthrallment suddenly broken, Scab let out a terrific roar and brought his club around in a brutally powerful overhead swing. But his blow struck nothing but the empty chair where Judith had been sitting, bursting it into fragments. The rhinoceros blinked stupidly at the demolished furniture, and it took a slothful moment for him to find the light, grey shape of his target alighting with finesse a few feet away. Judith snatched up one of the chair’s broken legs and, before Scab could take a second swing at her, threw it into his face, striking him direct on the cross-shaped scar between his eyes.

At the same time, Jarak rose from his chair and went for his swords, but his knees were barely straight before a pair of knives appeared in Nick’s paws and went slicing through the air, passing just either side of the camel before landing with dual  _ thwacks _ in the table behind. There was a snap of severed leather, and Jarak’s swords, belt, pants and dignity all slid to a heap around his ankles.

By the time Scab had cleared his vision, Judith had mounted the table and drawn her sword, its tip levelled an inch away from his neck. The rhino froze, staring in dismay at his disabled gangmates. He considered kicking the table over to regain the upper-paw, but Judith stared at him icily and shook her head, as if she could scry his thoughts and see the foolish scheme within. He swallowed deeply, and then his hardwood club did an impersonation of his comrade’s trousers and landed on the floor.

“If I were you,” Judith growled in tones that brooked no argument, “I’d get out of here. Before you make a mistake that can’t be put right…”

Without so much as a parting insult, Jarak and Scab abandoned their weapons and rushed for the door, the camel hobbling in his loose britches. By then Weaselton was coming unsteadily to his feet, clutching his broken snout and staring after his routed minions in disbelief. Nick leered at him.

“Looks like you’ve lost this one, sport. Best do like the rabbit suggests and get gone. And don’t think you’ll be getting your dagger back,” he remarked, plucking the knife from the tabletop and staring appreciatively at its curved blade. “It’s far too fine for some lowly criminal.”

“You’ll regret this; no one disrespects the Baltagiya!” Weaselton hissed through his swollen lip, and, without further elaboration, he stumbled across the commonroom floor and vanished out the door. The silence that had descended on the room persisted for a beat or two, save for the quiet scrape of coins pushed by the forfeiters into the bet-winners’ paws. Then the raucousness recommenced right where it left off, such violent outbursts being all too common in places like this. Nick retrieved his thrown knives with a brief apology to the party of aardvarks whose table he’d impaled, and then resumed his seat.

“Well, that ended better than I thought it would,” Nick muttered, taking up his tankard of ale. He’d barely so much as wet his lips, however, before Judith seized him by the collar and dragged his face close to hers. She wore a look that would be described in scholarly parlance as ‘extreme agitation’, and in all other tongues as ‘mad enough to chew your face off’.

“What in blazes were you thinking, you reckless lunatic?!” she hissed. “ _ Were you thinking at all?  _ And no, don’t answer that; it’s abundantly clear you weren’t, because we’ve been here— _ here,  _ in a city conquered by my nemesis—for half a day, and you’ve already started a pub brawl with local criminals over something as insignificant as an empty stool! Weren’t you listening when I said stay inconspicuous?!”

“I can stay away from trouble,” Nick groused, prying her enraged claws off his clothes. “I can’t do anything about trouble staying away from me.”

“And what about those earlier stunts, huh? Stealing things? Pickpocketing the guards? Is that you staying away from trouble?”

Nick rolled his eyes and put his tankard to his lips. “My oath, arguing with you is thirsty work.”

“For the sake of my sanity and your health, I pray you at least found us a half-decent boat.”

But Nick did not answer. He continued to drink in slow, rhythmic swallows, all the while staring at her as if she had just broached the most naive request. Conversations with Nick were rarely enjoyable, but it occured to Judith, with a sudden twinge of apprehension, that this one coming promised to be particularly unpleasant.

“Before we move to matters of a nautical nature,” he said, wiping the suds from his mouth with the back of his paw, “there’s an urgent matter of business between me and you that needs to be resolved. You’ve been my employer now for...what has it been? Two months? And over the course of this contract you’ve shown no hesitation in leveraging all my talents in a host of tiresome and taxing ways. Why, beyond such banal chores as pitching camp and drawing water, you’ve called on me to treat with all manner of scoundrels for passage or provisions. You dragged me into the depths beneath those cursed and barren mountains to do battle with an army of fleshless horrors—one of which, I’ll remind you, was three tonnes of ox-bone that nearly squashed us both. And now you’re dragging me off to battle new horrors—gorgons or kraken or what-have-you—without so much as an eyelid batted against what might be my grisly death.”

“Of course. You’re right. Only a callous taskmaster would demand you do something to earn your salary. Now hurry up and get to your point...unless the point you’re getting to is that you’re afraid.”

“The only thing I’m ‘afraid’ is that my paltry stipend is insufficient if you want me to risk my life again. For that, I need a raise. An extra five gold. Per week.”

Judith stared at him as if he had just requested his payment in unicorn ivory. Five gold was more than three times what he was currently earning, which was already double what any generous recruiter would say he deserved. It was an insult.

“You must be joking,” she gasped, waiting for the punchline. But Nick was playing no jester’s caper today.

“Certainly not, Cottontail.” he grinned. “If you don’t like those rates, you can go and hire some wasteland savage who’ll stab you in the back first chance they get. I don’t think you realise just how far from home you’ve wandered, or just how friendless you really are. No mammals beside me were willing to help you back home, and fewer than none are willing to help you here. Without me, you’re alone. Now let’s cut the theatrics, and you find five gold coins with my name on them...or I quit.”

For a long moment Judith simply stared at him as one might at rising water in a narrow passage—aghast at its intention to swallow you up, resigned that there could be no words to convince the waters to recede. Once Nick wanted something badly enough, he’d make it his by guile or fraud or force, and it was painfully plain, staring into that conceited expression, that this raise was something he wanted badly. If she argued with him, he’d just close over her head and drown her. She sighed.

“You won’t quit Nick. You’ll never be allowed to quit. Because you’re never going to get the opportunity. You’re dismissed.”

Nick snorted. He smiled. And then, when it became apparent that she was not merely getting carried away with a rhetorical expression—that she was not playing the jester’s caper, either—he glowered at her.

“That’s not a good idea, Fluffbutt. You’re prey, all alone in a mean world with big teeth, and you need someone who can yank it’s fangs, yeah? You need someone who can handle themselves in a fight. Someone who can watch your back.”

“Don’t presume to lecture me on what I need!” Judith suddenly roared, slamming the table with her fists hard enough to make their drinks jump. “I  _ need _ to bring the Teeth together before an unspeakable evil builds a throne of skulls to rule over a world-wide barony of sterile ash! What I don’t need—what has become glaringly obvious that I don’t need—is  _ you! _ You’ve been, at best, marginally efficient in combat, and ceaselessly grating at all other times! You’ve needed rescuing yourself more than once! You are waging an active campaign to reduce me to penury, all the while refusing to acknowledge the gravity of my mission, which is no less than the life of every soul in creation! And why are you like this!? Because the world sneers down its nose at you for being a fox?! You’re pathetic. You’re unworthy.”

With that, she thrust her paw into her coinbag, yanked out five gold pieces, and threw them with disdain before the stunned fox.

“You want an extra five gold?” she seethed. “There. Take them. But it’s not a raise; it’s severance pay. Now take your undeserved winnings and get out of here. I don’t care where you go, so long as I don’t have to suffer your loathsome company another second.”

Nick glanced at the little tawny disks, suddenly seeming so meager there on the table’s rough planks, and then back up at Judith, both brows arched high over his glistening eyes.

“You’re really going to do this alone?”

Judith sat back on her stool, her arms crossed as an impenetrable shield over a beatless heart, and said, “Goodbye, Nick. I wish I could say it’s been a pleasure.”

His gaze lingered on her before, finally accepting defeat, he scraped the coins off the table and into his tunic’s pockets. And then, with a small grin that could have been regret, or could have been pity, or could have been amusement, or could have been all of these or none, he stood up, bowed sarcastically, departed across the tavern floor, and walked out into the night.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Dear me. Looks like Nick went one wisecrack too many.
> 
> This isn't the first bar-room I've written, nor the first bar-room brawl, and I worried the two scenes were going to cross-pollinate. But now that they're both written, I can see clear differences between the Wayward Steps and the 'Don't Go' Inn. One is dingy and dangerous, while this one leans towards comedic farce, which is better suited to the tone of the story. I'm no Terry Pratchett at that kind of writing, but I think I hit upon one technique I can share; a properly silly place is made up of improbable people and events. Nothing that's going on is allowed to be normal. And if you can make all those details run into each other, it should give the experience of walking into a room and seeing an overwhelming amount of ludicrous behavior all at once: drinking; gambling; the cook doesn't want to be there; the minstrel is too drunk to play; there's mice drinking in the roof. If anything, the scene doesn't push it far enough; there should be a rhino drinking directly out of a barrel's bung, and a moose urinating straight onto someone's head, and a warthog belching so loudly it knocks over everyone's drinks, and an elephant tying to play that game where you rapidly stab the spaces between your fingers...only to realize he hasn't got any fingers. Dang, wish I'd thought of all those sooner.


	6. Survivor

There wasn’t much to recommend about the vegetable stew, which had the texture and taste of compost, so after pushing it around the plate in a fruitless search for the most palatable morsel, Judith finally shoved it away, drained the last of her juice, and got up from the table. A few nearby drinkers watched her from the corners of their eyes, still laughing about the unlikely thrashing the unassuming rabbit and fox had dispensed on the local criminals, unbothered about keeping their voices beneath a whisper. She ignored them and headed for the stairs, though she was stopped by the matron, who had an enormous bungstarter clutched in one huge trotter. It then occurred to her that perhaps the innkeeper meant to apologise for the trouble she’d encountered in her establishment, so she flashed her a gratified smile and said, “I’m fine, thank you. Not so much as a scratch on me. But I really would like to get to bed…”

The sow bent over, thrusting her broad, mallet-shaped snout right in Judith’s face, and pointed one finger over her shoulder. Judith turned, and saw that the matron was leading her attention to the smashed chair lying in a heap by her table. When she turned back, the sow was rubbing her fingers together.

Judith tried and failed to keep her jaw from falling open, and groaned incredulously. “You can’t be serious...” 

But from the look on her face, and the huge wooden mallet in her grasp, it was clear how serious the swine was, and Judith grudgingly thrust her paw, for what seemed the thousandth time that day, into her coinpurse to reimburse someone else’s vandalism. She almost threw the coins on the ground in disgust, then headed up the creaking stairs to the third-floor landing where her quarters were.

The door hung in a trapezoidal frame, so exaggerated the angles of its corners, so careless the paw responsible for its carpentering. Even so, it had a slidebolt on the interior side for privacy, and once she had shut and locked it, and the drink-fueled clamour of roisterers downstairs was stifled to a low murmur, she felt a wave of relief roll over her for being, at last, by herself in a quiet sanctuary.

The room was small and plain with an unvarnished wooden floor and pitched roof roughly troweled with limestone plaster. A bed with a simple but inviting straw mattress stood at one end of the room, opposite a few articles of rudimentary furniture: a battered storage chest, a wooden bench, a washbowl and pitcher of water. All these lay under an argent glow from the moonlight streaming through a glass-paned skywindow above, so bright that the unlit candle sitting on the bedstand would probably remain so. It was the perfect uncluttered, uncomplicated space to mull over what was decidedly a cluttered and complicated situation.

Judith’s head had become an arena for tug-o-war—the sensibility of dismissing Nick at one end of the rope, the increased difficulty of the task now facing her at the other. And while she wished to pretend that one side had the clear advantage, they were more evenly matched than could be ignored.

Yes, when she hired a boat tomorrow and set sail for Sunspire, she would do so without an unsavoury wretch who might have suddenly decided to boldly rob her at any moment. But she’d also do so without a helping paw, without second opinions, without an ally in whatever battles lay ahead. She would do so alone. And she wasn’t certain that she was up to the task.

She sighed and screwed her eyes with the ball of her thumb. The food had done her no good. Maybe a bath and a decent night’s sleep would. She unbuckled her breastplate and pauldrons, pulled her chainmail hauberk and cloth tunic over her head, stripped off her breeches and boots, and wrapped all snuggly in her mended cloak—the hyrax may have been an obnoxious ingrate, but her seamwork was worth her bad manners. Once her accouterments were safely coffered in the chest, she went in her undergarments to the basin. And there she stopped.

Standing by the washstand, tawny under a layer of unswept dust, was an oval mirror, cracked in half but large enough to encompass her whole body.

It had been a long time since she’d seen her own reflection, and she studied intently this gaunt and lean-limbed stranger peering back from the polished glass. A pair of shrewd and serious eyes flashed in her sockets. Her arms and legs were thicker with hard-won muscle. Here and there through her dirty fur one could see cracks and clefts, healed wounds from enemy swords and shafts that were like younger siblings to the trio of clawscars on her cheek. With uncharacteristic vanity she turned on one leg to admire the taut, fatless curves of her calves and buttocks, her eyes gliding over that shapely terrain and up the small of her back, alighting on the wrinkled tissue of her burnscar, her brutal disfigurement, a signature in her very flesh penned there by the foulest enemy she had ever or would ever face.

Suddenly it struck her, as certainly as there was solid ground underfoot, that the champion standing in the mirror was more than capable of surmounting the peaks between here and her goal, that this seasoned gladiatrix needed no chaperone or confidant. A warrior had set off from Roor-Shala that day long ago, staring grimly into the face of destiny. What stood here now was a survivor.

She smiled, eyes falling on the radiant blue gem hanging against her dewlap, whose current luster seemed like a cheerful endorsement of her epiphanic confidence. She’d been right about her partnership with Nick—a means to an end that had lost its meaning and merited ending. No prophecy was needed to know that he was rotten to the marrow, but whether he’d been predestined to betray her beyond a heartless fleecing for gold was a thread that would remain forever ravelled on fate’s great ball of yarn. She was done with that fox. She’d never have to look at him again.

With a clear winner in her cranial contest of tug-o-war declared, she decided that, if there was one aspect of her transformed visage that needed to revert to its former composure, it was the state of her fur. She filled the basin from the ewer, soaked a cloth in the cool water and sponged away the grime of endless miles until her coat was evenly grey again. Then she slipped near-naked under the tightly fitted bedcovers, tucking the sheets under her chin and grinning at the pleasure of a mattress that wasn’t hard boards or hard dirt. This time tomorrow would find her at the helm of a sturdy vessel, ably charting her own course without another to chide her, to challenge her, or best of all, to go on tunelessly whistling for hours like an unattended kettle. And all that stood between her and that beautiful reality was a night’s rest in a comfortable bed.

Soon she was fast asleep, and her satisfied smile went nowhere.

 

\---

 

Time passed. The stars traced their arcs in the night sky above. 

No mere mammal staring up from their insignificant terrestrial sphere could have guessed that those stars were far away, separated by an infinity of soundless, airless void, their light aeons old.

And it was beyond any observer to see one of those suns, and all its orbiting planets, and every other spall of matter in its vast cyclic kingdom, abruptly vanish.

The thing responsible for this awesome act of cosmic destruction is no entity a sane mind can contemplate. Nor is it able to contemplate itself, for this thing, it has no mind, it does not breathe. It moves with the hideous predictability of mathematical formulae to find broken worlds, and when it does it reduces them to celestial ash.

It does not yet know of a world where a rabbit sleeps soundly, dreaming that her life is about to take a turn for the better. It does not yet have the scent.

But it will. It is only a matter of time.

 

\---

 

In the very early hours of the morning, there was a quiet  _ click  _ from up in the ceiling, and the skywindow swung gently downward on its hinges, allowing a rope to be unspooled into the room below. A dark shape slid down the line like a spider on a thread, alighting gently and slinking across the floor on an assassin’s silent feet, finally pausing over the bed where Judith lay sleeping, slack-jawed and snoring, as vulnerable as a day-old kit. The shadowclad intruder grinned wickedly, sliding back his hood to reveal, to absolutely no-one’s surprise, a recently unemployed fox underneath.

“Well well, Snoozing Beauty,” Nick smirked. “Looks like you’re not as rid of me as you thought.”

He’d been hatching this plan like a broody hen for days now, ever since he’d realised, while the pair of them were bouncing and jostling in the back of that damned fodder-wagon, that he was putting himself through this torture for Judith’s money, and he’d be infinitely better off if he took the ‘hard’ out of ‘hard-earned pay’ and simply burglarized the bunny’s wealth. 

But it wasn’t some common egg he’d been squatting on. He didn’t want a scrawny, scant-feathered chicken at the end of his troubles. He wanted the golden goose.

That is to say, Judith had, sequestered on her person, two gems of exquisite quality with, as he could attest from personal experience, magical properties unlike anything ever witnessed. They were priceless—a phrase Nick had never really appreciated, because there wasn’t a single object in all of creation that you couldn’t slap a figure on, and for these particular jewels, Nick was imagining a particularly lengthy number of zeroes. And now that Judith thought she was unburdened from his company, she’d left them unguarded.

Yesterday, no doubt, she thought he’d wasted his time prowling the streets, swiping petty valuables and ruminating on how he ought to get paid more for this vital work. But in fact, he’d done exactly as he’d been told and gone down to Ashkadod’s harbour, a tangle of mighty stone wharfs and wooden jetties protruding out into the milk-white sand. There Nick had hired a rigged skiff, a sturdy enough vessel to carry a small crew to the other side of the ocean and back.

Except, this boat wouldn’t be coming back. And its small crew would be exactly one.

“Sorry, Carrots,” he said, smiling down at her. “When you wake up later, I’ll be long gone, far out to sea, far beyond your reach. And I’ll have with me the things you hold most dearly in this world…”

With gentle fingers he rolled back the hem of the sheet, and there it was, lying on the bare cleave of her chest, as perfect and blue as a summer day.

Nick’s grin all but doubled in size, his green eyes sparkling with covetous glee. He began to salivate at the thought of what some foreign baron or king or emperor would part with to own even one of these treasures, and he was about to possess two. He was going to be a very wealthy fox. Wealthy enough for a keep and lands and guards and a beautiful wife. Wealthy enough to ensure that the rest of the world would be scrambling out from underneath his foot, and not the other way around.

Judith had always told him that the magic of the Teeth was hers alone to command, and if he were ever to touch one some dreadful consequence would be visited upon him. He’d heard it so many times that the warnings had all blurred together: that he’d suffer unspeakable pain, that a colossal evil would fall from the skies to devour him, that his pizzle would shrivel up in his codpiece and suddenly start growing out his ear. They were fairytale admonishments, frankly insulting in their childish fictionality. Judith probably should have considered a better safeguard for her invaluable jewels than a half-wit’s ghost-story, especially since, once he had both of them, she’d have no way of tracking them down.

“Oh well. Better luck next world-saving quest,” Nick smirked, reaching down and plucking the gem off her chest.

And then the room exploded.

It was as if the force of a raging stormfront found itself bottled in the space of a teacup.

The walls shook, the ceiling cracked. Lumps of plaster fell from the roof like hailstones, and the furniture burst into fragments. The beams under the floorboards shrieked and sheared, opening a gaping sinkhole in the center of the room through which everything on the third floor went pouring down into the one below.

Rudely awakened by all this chaos, Judith came to in a pile of bedlinen and detonated straw, goggling at the inexplicable destruction, at the dust and woodchips raining down from the crater-rim above. The poor badger who’d been sleeping below her had been knocked unconscious by a falling lintel and lay sprawled in the middle of the room, his tongue lolling out of his mouth. And sitting right next to him, crosseyed and rocking like a drunken idiot, was Nick.

Somehow the blast hadn’t smeared him up the wall like a handful of jam, but it had clobbered the sense out of him, giving him a pretty ruthless case of tinitus as well. His vision was blurred, too, and it took a few moments before he realised that the smudged shape standing in front of him was Judith, looking down at the guilty fox with mingled shock, pity, and white-hot fury.

“Oh, Nick,” she hissed through clenched teeth. “What the hell have you done?”

“Awas trying to steal you magig gebs,” slurred Nick.

Judith ignored him, rushing instead to the center of the room where the chest had split open and spilled out her belongings. She could hear alarmed shouts outside, and the tramp of feet on stairs—the innkeeper, no doubt, still with that giant wooden maul in her grasp, and probably a dozen or so patrons, all curious about what on earth was happening. And Judith didn’t feel like being there to explain how the second-story room now had a very spacious attic.

She hefted her bundle over her shoulder and spun back to Nick, who was having difficulty standing up straight, as if his legs had suddenly sprouted additional knees. “Judith, what the hell was that?!” he gasped, only to have her shout “No time to explain!” in response and slam her paw into his chest, shoving him head-over-tail out the window.

On the street below, the various mammals who were either late to bed or early to rise were staring at the tavern in confusion, pointing at the cracks forming on its walls and wondering aloud if it had just been struck by a minor earthquake. Their surprise only intensified when they saw a fox come pinwheeling out of the upstairs window, bounce off a canvas sail, and land in a heap in the middle of the road. He was quickly followed by a half-naked rabbit who landed much more gracefully beside him. Utterly stunned, every soul simply watched as the scantclad bunny grabbed the addled fox by the wrist, dragged him to his feet, and fled down an alleyway into the shadows.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Nick, it seems, cant be gotten ride of. Once he's part of your world, he just keeps coming back. Like...herpes.
> 
> I really enjoyed this chapter because of Judith's moment of self-appreciation, which seemed to perfectly suit a character experiencing doubts, only to find the strength to go on by seeing her own reflection. I like it because it's in line with current trends to affirm the capability of female characters while fitting in with the plot (Did you see Endgame? The bit where all the female superheroes lined up to lay the smack down on Thanos' legions? Nice idea, and very positive, but executed with fists made of ham that were also holding hams while a ham radio played in the background). I also like it because it Judith being something other than dour or angry for once. Which leads me to why it took a while to get this chapter uploaded.
> 
> As I'm posting this story, I'm also writing the 4th Of Salt And Steel; by not posting Wounded World all at once, I think I'll avoid having a glut of time at the end with no completed story to tell. And I realized that, over the course of that story, I'd boiled Nick and Judith's intricacy down a little bit because they were so obsessed with the villain. There weren't many moments where they got to lark about, which on reflection I really dislike, because the characters from the movie have a spectrum of complexity: determined seriousness, sly jocularity, heart-rending vulnerability, genuine mirth. I want them to come across as multi-faceted characters rather than bland archetypes, so I'm taking my time to make sure I get it right.
> 
> But hey...at least each time I upload, you know another OSAS chapter got finished. So that's something! Comments and kudos keep me going.


	7. The Magic in You

Judith watched warily from behind the alleymouth until it was clear that no-one was following her, whereupon she blew out a sigh of relief and turned back to the courtyard where she’d sought sanctuary. It was a simple square with an unpaved floor, a communal well at its center. Reclining against one of the walls was Nick; after Judith had dropped him there, he’d given up on blubbering incoherently in favour of passing out. Which Judith, still in her undergarments, appreciated immensely.

She took a moment to slip into her tunic and breeches, then pulled her chainmail hauberk over her head and buckled on her breastplate and pauldrons. Once properly attired, she turned her attention back to her recently deposed partner. He was staring up at the sky in senseless incapacity, his tongue dangling out of his mouth like a wet, pink slug. She wrinkled her nose. Anyone in their right mind would leave him here to face the consequences of his duplicity unaided. 

But she couldn’t. Not now. It was time to wake him up and give him the good news.

She took the wooden bucket from the lip of the well and cast it in. It rattled off the stone steining and landed with an echoing  _ plop _ . When the bucket had the weight of fullness, she hauled it up by its frayed rope, wrestled it over the well’s rim, and held the bucket poised over the unconscious fox. The water was smoking cold; she could feel its sting from what leaked through the bucket’s staves and ran down her arm. Then, without so much as a pause, she emptied its chilling contents directly onto his head.

Nick came awake as if from a nightmare, thrashing and screaming. Then, when it became apparent he was not being savaged by monsters, he settled down some, breathing heavily and staring about in blank confusion.

“What happened?” he gasped. “Where am I?”

“In an alley,” said Judith, dragging him to his feet. “How are you feeling?”

“I’ve got one devil of a headache.”

“How many fingers am I holding up?” she asked, raising a paw.

“Four?”

“Good.”

With that, she brought her open palm crashing against the side of his face, knocking him straight back down onto the ground.

“And that’s far less than you deserve!” she spat.

Nick managed to sit up straight, probing his tender jaw with his fingers. “Is that your idea of administering medical attention?” he asked.

“Don’t make light of things!” Judith barked. “You snuck into my room to rob me! By my oath, I knew you were a worthless sack of deceit, but even I didn’t guess you’d go so far!”

“Then you’re a greater fool than I thought,” Nick shot back, getting unsteadily to his feet, brushing wet sand off his tunic. “Those shiny marbles of yours are worth all the gold of Sugarglidas. Why on earth did you think I wouldn’t risk swiping them?”

“You’re right, Nick,” said Judith, throwing her hands in the air. “I am a fool beyond redemption; I only warned you 800 times that they can only be touched by an anointed Custodian, and that something terrible would happen to you if you lay a finger on them.”

“You could have elaborated on the concept of ‘something terrible’ beforehand. I thought you meant I’d be cursed unto the eighth generation or whatever—not that the room I was in would blast into a hundred pieces, and I’d be given a migraine like a blackout hangover.”

“And now,” Judith continued, her voice saturated with despair, “I’ve got civic property damage to add to a growing list of things you’ve done that are putting us in the spotlight! I can just imagine the reports that will be cycling through the barracks before breakfast is over: a guard pickpocketed; a drunken brawl in a tavern; a god-damned  _ explosion! _ You snuck us into this den of wild beasts unnoticed, only to ring a great big dinnerbell over our heads!”

“Look, Cottonwad,” Nick muttered, seizing a fistful of his cloak and trying to wring it dry. “As delighted as I am that you’re getting the grasp of comedic metaphor, that bucket of water you threw at my face has chilled me to the bone, and what I need is a warm hearth to dry myself by, not a lecture.”

“We don’t have time for that. Our best chance of getting out of here now is to make it to the docks and set sail before one of us is recognised. If we—”

“We?” Nick interrupted. “What the hell is this ‘we’ business? Last time I checked, my contract with you was terminated. ‘We’ don’t have to do anything.”

Judith stared at him, her expression a patchwork of anger and frustration, contempt and pity, before saying, “You can’t leave now, Nick.”

“That’s very touching,” he said. “But I’ve recently come to the realisation that being around you is worse than a case of genital mange. Fighting in your employ just involves more risk than a rogue like me is comfortable navigating. And since it turns out I can’t even touch your trinkets without getting blown into confetti, it’s time for me to move on. So, farewell forever, you stuck-up dirt-bather, and good luck saving the world.”

And with that, and paying no attention to the way her look of frustration dissolved into one of condescending derision, Nick turned his sodden back on her and walked into the street.

The twilight darkness was beginning to relent before a copper dawn, and all sorts of morning trade was well underway. It would be an hour yet before the nail-biting cold was swapped for intolerable heat, and that was an hour too long as far as Nick, standing there in his wet clothes, was concerned. So he went to a tent where a near-sighted olingo was frying pastries, bought breakfast with a pair of stamped rivetheads, and dried himself by the cookfire while he considered his options. He’d been smart enough not to offer a deposit on the skiff, and while he could still head to the harbour and claim it, or book passage on some merchant galley bound for the other side of the ocean, he didn’t fancy the idea of charting a course that might cross Judith’s at any point. There had been a broad array of caravans with their mercenary protection halted in the vast surrounds of Ashkadod, any number of which could be convinced they needed a fox with his particular skillset amongst their company. It didn’t really bother him, so long as there was money to be made, and so long as they were heading east, along the coast to the city of Bashinpur, to the territories of the Gultisian Empire, to a hundred strange and foreign kingdoms beyond. So long as they were going east. Never west.

Having his next source of employment all lined up brightened Nick no end, and he wiped the crumbs off his lips and started on his way back to the main gate.

He’d barely made it a dozen steps, however, before his head began to throb. He frowned; he’d woken up this morning with one of the worst headaches he’d ever experienced, but the dose of wellwater had seen it off, and it perplexed him that a migraine should vanish completely only to spring back a few minutes later. He kept walking, hoping that the pain would desert him as quickly a second time, but it did not; it persisted, escalating in its potency until he was forced to stop and cradle his head in his paws, groaning at the iambic pulse in his temples.

Someone ran into him from behind and told him off for blocking the walkway in their husky dialect. Nick furiously opened his mouth to fire some retort back, only to immediately snap it shut when that beast nausea suddenly uncoiled in his stomach and gnashed its jaws. He doubled over, breathing deeply through his nose in a desperate effort to keep his breakfast where it belonged. And all the while the furious palpitation inside his head continued to drum, steadily gaining in tempo, slashing the backs of his eyes with razors of pain until the only thing that kept him howling out in agony was the fear that if he parted his lips it would be to let out a shower of vomit.

Then it dawned on him why he was beset by this maelstrom of misery. Of course—barely an hour ago his brain had been rattled around by some terrific force, and he was only just now feeling its full effect! He was a like a soldier who can stand the pain until he actually sees the full extent of his injuries. And Nick had just looked down and spotted his own gizzards hanging out.

Panic seized him. He needed to find help.

Getting out of the street was his first objective, but his knees were buckling under him, his bones hocus-pocused into gelatin. He lurched against the nearest wall, the crowd parting around him, taking him for a rotten liquorfiend. He was oblivious to their scorn; all his concentration was consumed by trying desperately to recall if this was a road he had walked yesterday, a road with an inexpensive hostel where he might be allowed to lie down and wait for the symptoms to run their course. Desperate to believe there was respite up ahead, he forced himself to move, using the wall to support his weight.

Then the pain in his head spiked sharply, like an icecube dropped inside the bell of his skull. His world ran like wet ink. He could taste copper. Something was clogging his nostrils, and he swept the back of his paw across his nose only to have it come away smeared with blood. He stared at it for a long time, as if it were some inexplicable substance pouring out of him, although really he was simply arrested by the hideous thought that the damage was much worse than he had reckoned, that the explosion had reduced his brains to lumpy slurry, and that in a few seconds he would drop face-first into this gutter and die.

He was going to die. And there wouldn’t even be a decent funeral.

But then, mercifully, he felt the pain begin to abate. His stomach ceased its churning. The razors were withdrawn from his eyeballs. And slowly, slowly, the agonising pulse in his head lost its intensity, and at last departed completely.

“Oh, thank god,” Nick muttered, his eyes pinched shut. “Whatever and wherever you are, thank you, thank you,  _ thank you…” _

“I never thought you’d be so religious, Nick,” came a familiar voice. “But it is nice, if a bit blasphemous, to call me a god.”

Nick opened his eyes, squinting. His world was regaining colour and form, but one patch remained resolutely grey, and that’s because it was Judith, standing over him and staring as a nursemaid might at a misbehaving kit.

“If you were god,” he groaned, “I’d pray I was going to hell. What do you want?”

“You look ill, Nick.”

“I’m fine,” he muttered, but he certainly didn’t look so; his fur stood on end, there was blood crusting in his nostrils, he couldn’t stand up straight and his eyes were completely bloodshot, a storm of red lighting bombarding each shrunken pupil.

“Are you sure, Nick?” Judith asked, her voice thick with mock concern. “It really looks like you’ve come down with something. Are you sure you don’t need medicine?”

Her feigned unease pricked his rage, and he waved her off with an uncoordinated swat. “Begone!” he snarled. “All I need is for you to get out of my sight!”

“I wouldn’t recommend that, Nick. I’m the only thing keeping you alive right now.”

“By the devil’s ass, what are you talking about!?” he cried. But she was grinning smugly at him now, which froze him and his tongue directly in their place. Judith’s emotions existed on a tiny spectrum, with ‘irritated’ at one pole and ‘tongue-chewing anger’ at the other. There was no space on her continuum for ‘smug’.

“I told you not to touch them,” she said. “And I saw the glint in your eye, a loud and clear larum that you wanted to possess them. And I saw, everytime I warned you, that glint get brighter and brighter. Well, now that it seems all my warnings fell on deaf ears, it’s time I explained to you exactly why you were so warned. Like I said, the stones are conduits that channel the magic shielding our world, and there is more power in them than we could ever imagine. You’ve seen for yourself; it was the Tooth that stitched life to those lifeless bones beneath the Deadstones. But something else altogether happens when a living creature with free will disturbs them…”

Nick’s face fell. The misbehaving kit was about to feel the leather strap.

“You are altered, Nick. You are you, plus something else stirred in: it’s not just blood creeping in your veins; not just bones propping up that lurking form; not just muscle composing that fearful look on your face. Now there is magic coursing in you as well. And if you don’t keep close to the stone you’ve touched, that same magic will rive your muscle and crack your bones and dry up your blood. It will destroy you. '' She leaned in close, her face inches from his, so she could watch clearly as his confusion and outrage were transmuted into dread, and added, “In short, Nick, you won’t accompany me to Sunspire for an extra five gold a week. Now, you’ll do it for free. Or you’ll perish.”

“You’re bluffing,” Nick protested hoarsely, but his voice was empty of conviction, and Judith simply shrugged and said, ”For your sake, I hope so.” Then she turned and sauntered down the lane, moving as one without a care in the world, as one on their way to lunch with amiable friends. Nick watched her melt into the crowd, until all he could see of her was a pair of ears bobbing amidst the bustle, and then nothing at all. A chorus of voices was screaming inside his head, demanding him  _ follow her not! She’s the puppeteer at the strings of a malicious lie! _ And he wished deeply to believe that voice, to follow its advice, to head for the surrounds and the caravans and the beckoning horizon. 

But one quiet and persistent tongue cut through the self-deceiving clamour and told him over and over that it was the truth. Then he felt the nerves behind his eyes knot together, felt fresh blood well in his nose, and, with a venomous curse damning this interior soothsayer, he rushed after her.

Almost at once he was presented with an impassable wall of mammalian traffic, having to squeeze between tight-packed shoulders, paunches and buttocks where Judith had slipped easily between their legs. He fought desperately for a sign of her, calling her name, though his words were lost in the mad clamour. Suddenly he spotted a ripple of purple fabric through the commotion, only to have it eclipsed just as suddenly by the huge gut of a corpulent bull who could not see the fox for his armloads of sacked flour, and Nick had to dive through the bovine’s legs on his belly, avoiding being squashed by the slimmest of margins. He was quickly on his feet and turning to spit a mouthful of curses when he ran backwards into an antelope with a basket of linen, and two of them, along with all her precious white laundry, landed in a heap on the filthy lane. The doe began to shriek as if she were being murdered and pummeled Nick about the head with her hamper’s lid.“Enough, you malignant shrew!” Nick howled, trying to kick the aggrieved laundress away. But he was enveloped by her linen, his struggle more humorous than harmful, and when he finally got to his feet and rushed off down the street he did so wrapped head-to-tail in a crisp white sheet, looking like a rushed mummy, a mummer’s ghost in a stageplay, and the onlookers’ howls of laughter chased him far more efficiently than he was chasing his quarry. He cursed and growled and finally got his claws into the fabric, rending it to ribbons, just in time to see Judith walk through the beaded curtain of a vestibule archway. He sprinted to catch her, though his legs locked up and his face descended into nauseated disbelief when he saw that the sign over the door read  _ Mystic Springs _ .

An outdoor gymnasium. For naturalists.

“You have got to be kidding,” Nick muttered.

Already feeling his innards begin to twist into queasy knots, Nick barged the beads aside and found himself standing in a small, eclectically decorated antechamber, illuminated solely by the flames of heaped candles melting slowly into communal puddles of wax. There was a velvet curtain filling an ogee arch at the far end of the room, and, seated in meditation behind a low wooden counter, was a yak, humming softly through a buzzing cloud of flies. Nick didn’t need the powers of a Custodian to know the yak was completely naked. Grimacing, he tried to tiptoe across the room, hoping to slip through the curtain unnoticed, but a pair of piercing eyes suddenly appeared from a crack in the yak’s waterfall of lank hair and pinned Nick in place.

“Oh. Greetings, friend,” the yak said pleasantly, getting to his feet and momentarily displacing the swarm of insects that coated his fur. In defiance of what Nick actually wanted, his eyes did a quick sweep of the yak. Yep. Completely.

“Greetings, uh...guru,” Nick said, keeping his gaze on the goggling orbs peeking out from the yak’s fringe for fear he would see again another pair of orbs. “I’m searching for—”

“Ultimate truth?” the yak suggested. “Aren’t we all, my brother.”

“—someone…” Nick finished. “And I’m pretty sure they came through here. So, if I could just…”

“Hold up, my furry friend,” interrupted the yak, moving to block Nick’s passage with his considerable presence. “I’m afraid I can’t let you in as you are. The mammals in there are tapping into the energy of the cosmos, trying to get close to the true meaning of existence. If you walk around in all that black leather and fabric, their connections are going to get all...unconnected.”

“But you let that rabbit in all her armour go in!” Nick protested.

“Huh? Rabbit in armour? No way, friend. I’m sure I would have noticed.”

Suddenly Nick heard a snort of laughter from behind the curtain, a spark that set off the dry tinder of his irritation. She was standing  _ right there _ , listening to his humiliation. In a paroxysm of indignation, he unbuckled his effects and hauled off all his clothes, until he was wearing nothing but his rucksack, every other stitch he owned bundled up in his arms.

“Thanks, my canine cousin,” said the yak with a blissful smile. “Now you can feel the world’s spirit against your naked fur. Can’t you feel it?” As if to demonstrate the superiority of this ungarmented state, the yak gyrated his hips. Something else gyrated along with it.

“Oh, I’m going to murder her  _ so many times _ for this…” Nick hissed, and kicked the curtains aside with his foot.

What lay beyond was a veritable bacchanalia of bareness. Animals were relaxing in the tranquil waters of a bathing pool, and sunning themselves on flat rocks, and reclining in wallows of sizzling mud, and meditating on the soft grass and reclining on sofas and reading philosophical texts and licking and combing themselves and all without so much as a cap to be seen. And there, standing unseen by a small grove of palms and grinning at Nick in the most insufferable fashion imaginable, was Judith. She hadn’t removed so much as a bootlace.

“Looking good, Nick,” she chuckled, and he self-consciously lowered his bundled clothes to cover his shame. “I’d join you, but I’ve already been for a scant-clad jaunt this morning.” With that, and apparently unobserved because of her small stature, Judith set off across the palaestra, and Nick had no choice but to gird his loins and follow.

It wasn’t that he was prudish. (And  _ where  _ exactly had this brazen streak in Judith come from? He’d thought her so uptight that she might not even get fully undressed to bathe, and here she was sauntering through a gallery of genitals without so much as a blush!) Gods knew that he was no stranger to a bout of public indecency, especially once augmented with enough drink. What made his skin crawl with discomfort now was this sudden shift in power. Just yesterday, it was he who held all the cards; now Judith’s paw was crammed with aces, he was running out of money to meet the ante, and she was proving to be quite the cardsharp. The thought of being at her mercy made his stomach churn...although, some of the more permissive attitudes on display at Mystic Springs weren’t helping. It would be a while before he had a dream unhaunted by that elephant laying on her back with legs spread and pointing skyward. It would be a while before he wanted to eat oysters again, as well.

When he finally reached the other side, Judith was waiting for him, slouched against a pillar and studying with undisguised humor his graceless attempt to clamber back into his clothes.

“I hope you enjoyed that as much as I did,” she snorted. “And what did we learn?”

“That you’re a repressed deviant?” Nick hissed, wrestling one boot on with partly gloved paws.

“Well, I hope you learned that being small isn’t a handicap. I hope you learned that when I tell you something, it’s in your best interests to listen. And I  _ know  _ you learned that there’s no easy way out of this predicament you’ve put yourself in. If you ever stray too far from this—” She held up her paw, suspending on her finger the blue gem that just hours ago he had been desperate to possess, and how never wanted to see again. “—you’ll start to fall to pieces. So, wherever it goes, you’ll follow. Like I said—you can’t leave.”

“For how long?”

“Until all eight of the Teeth are reunited. Until my quest is done.”

Sitting there half-dressed on the sandy ground, Nick was the very portrait of pitiful. He looked up and fixed her with his wobbling green eyes. “So I’m your slave then? Hmm? You crack the whip and I must obey?”

“Think of it more like this; you foolishly caught a sickness, and I’m your medicine.”

He sighed, and then stood up, shoulders slumped in defeat. “Alright. Alright, then. All eight of the bastards. I’ll stick it out to the end. I don’t exactly have a choice, right?”

“Let’s shake on it, anyway,” Judith suggested with a smirk. “Make it official.”

Nick hesitantly raised one paw, but let it fall to his side a moment before Judith could take it.

“Oh, don’t be such a poor sport,” Judith said, but then she glanced up and saw utter incredulity plastered across his face, and saw that his eyes were not on her, but on something over her shoulder. She turned, and immediately adopted Nick’s expression for herself. Standing at the mouth of the street was a weasel of late acquaintance to them, a weasel with a fat lip and a missing fang, with murderous intent extruding from his every pore. 

And with five Grey soldiers standing at his back.

“That’s them,” Weaselton hissed. “They’re the ones you’re hunting.”

At that, two of the soldiers, DelGato and Fangmeyer, in their  black tunics with blue sashes, stepped forward, one of them uncoiling a length of black silk binding rope while the other drew his sword and levelled it at the startled pair.

“You there!” DelGato barked. “By the will of his Highness, the Regent Lionheart of Ashkadod, you will throw down your weapons and submit to arrest. Do as I say...or your lives are forfeit”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Maybe, Nick, you should have taken the original deal.
> 
> So...is this version of Nick unnecessarily mean? Is this version of Judith similarly joyless? Is the levity in my fun little adventure story circling the plughole? It's popped up in comments and in my editor's notes, so it's worth dedicating a moment to. I personally don't think so. Yeah, Nick wanted her property, so he pulled her fur until she snapped and sent him away. That's not so distant from the version of Nick that sentences Judy to a hours-long stint in the DMV queue. And Judith being willing to manipulate Nick's position to her own advantage is only missing an "It's called a hustle sweetheart" at the end. Like I said, this version of the characters is, for me, more reminiscent of their turbulent relationship at the beginning of the movie. But that's just me. It's entirely possible you see these characters as being heartless, that their snark and banter is a veil over some genuine malice. Not my intention, but intention and the finished product are always in different worlds, and my writing has always had a dark streak lurking at the periphery.
> 
> However, it's not going to change how I write the story. One of the greatest deficits I think my previous writing had was a focus on formula. How to get from A to B. Stopping to actually consider how Judith or Nick might feel in a given scenario, and realizing that those feelings aren't always going to be positive, is how I'm going to escape the paucity of characterization I feel has been endemic of things so far. All I can promise is that I'm still big on the idea that pacing is important, and that traumas or epiphanies aren't to be rushed out on stage for the quick but ultimately unrewarding emotional high. Things, as far as these two are concerned, can only get better.
> 
> Hmmm...that was all a bit melancholy and reflective. Something fun, something fun...how did you like the bit where Nick had to strip naked and walk through the nudist colony? That was funny, right?
> 
> See you all soon for the last installment of Act 1! Remember, comments and kudos are food to me, and I'm always hungry.


	8. Run

Nick had heard words to this effect probably a hundred times in his life, from all manner of different mammals, lawful or otherwise, all variously wishing for his detention or destruction. And every time, the only intelligent response had been to run.

Judith was even faster to this conclusion, and by the time he’d spun on his heel and started running she was in the lead, effortlessly outpacing him, not least because his breeches were slipping down and he was carrying one boot in his paw. There were shouts from the guards, the Grey oafs screaming for them to stop as if they might actually comply, while Fangmeyer and DelGato focused on hurling all their considerable effort and prowess into pursuing them with brutal, resolute purpose.

The morning bustle was only growing, but Judith put her natural agility to use by slipping under, ducking past and bouncing over the surprised merchants, artisans and labourers who were choking the lane. Nick took to the same challenge with infinitely less proficiency, running into and bouncing off all the same obstacles. He could hear, very close to his ears, the crisp impact of mailed boots on sandstone, and the brutal  _ thud  _ of very large and muscular bodies knocking much smaller ones aside. 

“Carrots! Wait for me!” he screamed at Judith’s retreating back.

If she heard Nick’s alarmed request, she didn’t comply. All her mental energy was consumed with devising a plan to get out of there. If she—if  _ they _ —ended up in Grey custody, it would be all over. She could perhaps use her sorcery: either the blue gem, with its known facility for hurling objects around, or her purple one, whose powers were yet a mystery. But she didn’t want to affirm to any enemy that she had even one Tooth, let alone two. Nor was she yet aware of what sort of power these stones now possessed in tandem; if overusing one could exhaust her, two would be even worse, and she didn’t want to find out how much so in the middle of fleeing for her life. That meant the harbour, and whatever scrappy little raft Nick had hired, was their best and only chance. And it would be sunk too if these goons followed them down to the jetties. Which meant that they needed, somehow, to throw off their unwelcome escort first.

With a cry of “Keep up!” to Nick, she executed a 90-degree turn down a narrow street, hoping to find a way to put either cover or distance between them and the guards. The street seemed to be entryway to a block of affluent residences, where all the marble was neatly polished, the windows were latticed with intricate  _ jali _ , and the rooftops were openair gardens, both sides linked to one another by a series of petite stone bridges. Wealthy-looking tenants, their bodies swaddled in costly fabric and their fingers dipped in silver, stood about engaged in the sort of relaxed gossip that the social elites can afford, and they looked at Nick and Judith charging down their street as if they were mangy lepers streaked with their own feces. Judith hardly paid them any mind...until she spied one long-necked giraffe turning languidly to see what the fuss was.

“Up we go, Nick!” Judith shouted.

The giraffe saw her at the same moment she leaped through the air, arms outstretched, and seized his neck as though it were the rung on a ladder. She had already scampered to the top of his head and bounced onto the upper-story gallery before the giraffe’s consternation could manifest as a ear-piercing shriek. By then Nick had jammed his loose boot in his mouth to give him back both his paws, and was endeavouring to likewise scale the giraffe’s nape, while the inches-close guards reached out, their clawtips grazing the hem of his cloak.

But he wasn’t going to let himself be shackled by this pack of dawdling half-brains. With a single powerful kick, he launched himself off the giraffe’s shoulder, sailed up to his head, planted a second foot right in his brow, and propelled himself over the bridge’s low balustrade, nearly landing directly on Judith’s head.

The pair of them risked a peak over the edge; the guards, it seemed, were keenly aware that they were too massive to attempt a similar ascent, even if the poor giraffe was willing to allow the attempt, which he most definitely was not (if fleeing in gibbering terror with both arms flailing in the air was any indication). Instead, they were backtracking swiftly down the lane, Fangmeyer shouting that they would cut off the runaways further along, DelGato commanding that they send for reinforcements. Once they were out of sight, Judith and Nick jumped to their feet and beat a likewise hasty retreat along the rooftop terraces, vaulting whatever railings or planters were in their way, sprinting past occupants who either ran for the safety of their doorways or watched the drama unfold from their reclining chairs with bold curiosity.They discovered that the end of the terraces joined with the shingled rooftop of the next building, and continued their escape over the slippery ceramic tiles, trying their best to remain un-gawked at by pedestrians in the street below. 

They covered a quarter-mile this way before Nick found a safe place to jump down—a great haystack in a feedlot where grass was being turned into cheap silage. With a moment to gird their nerves, the both of them leaped, fell with cloaks twisting behind them, and landed with a pair of poiseless  _ thumps _ in the coarse straw.

“Blasted hay!” Judith moaned, dragging herself out of her second haystack in as many days. “I’m done with it. I hope it vanishes from the earth. I hope every mammal that eats the damned itchy stuff dies of starvation.”

Behind her, Nick sat reuniting his bare foot with his other boot. “ Huh. So you can be angry with things that aren’t me, ” he muttered.

Looking about, Judith realised that the hay being dried and baled here wasn’t meant for the mouths of the city poor, but rather as fodder for the frightful scythe-blade mandibles of clickers. The feedlot also pulled duty as a stable for the beasts, several of which she could see congregating under the shade of some open byres, sifting mindlessly through their troughloads of chaff, apparently unbothered by the rope tethers knotted about their necks. If they regarded Nick or Judith at all through their black, glassy ocelli, they obviously did not consider them a curiosity worth disturbing their meal to investigate.

“We won’t have a lead on those Grey cronies for long,” Judith said. “We have to get out of here, quick; if they trap us somewhere with no exit, we’re finished.”

“Well maybe if you hadn’t been prancing around in a nudist colony just to put my muzzle out of joint, we wouldn’t be running away from a pack of armed guards!”Nick grumbled.

“Oh! Of course it’s all my fault!” Judith fired back. “None of it has anything to do with you sneaking into my bedchamber to fill your pockets with my valuables!”

“How did they know us by sight?! Hmm?! I bet that hyena squealed—I told you we should have beaten some fear into him!”

“Why on earth would they need an informant?! They probably just followed your trail of larceny and destruction!”

Their eyes were inches apart now, noses almost touching, their brows knotted into fearsome scowls. But the fire didn’t last; the gauntlet of shocks and twists that made up the last few days had burned up all the tinder. So Judith stood up straight, took a deep breath, sighed it out, and looked Nick square in the eyes.

“Ok. Let’s concentrate on facts. The Enforcement knows we’re here. We have to get out of the city. You have to stay close to the Teeth, which means you have to stay close to me. So whether either of us likes it or not, we’re stuck together. And if we don’t work together, we’ll share a dungeon cell together.” With that, she extended her paw, and Nick, though he could not discard the facial expression of someone who has just had a live worm placed on their tongue, nodded, took her offer of a mutual truce, and let her pull him to his feet.

“Alright,” he muttered, buckling and tucking in what few articles of clothing were still loose or falling off. “For now, we’ll work in lockstep rather than kicking each other in the shins _.  _ So, in what direction do we take our newly coordinated movements?”

“To the harbour,” Judith said, gesturing to the far side of the stableyard where the only exit was. “As soon as we have a deck underfoot and a sail overhead, these nimrods won’t have a chance of chasing us down.”

Much of Ashkadod was coated in a layer of sand, given the city’s proximity to an endlessly morphing desert. But it became apparent, as they hurried across the stableyard, that here it had been deliberately poured a few inches thicker to sop up a nearly endless deluge of liquid clicker feces. Everything stank in the most godless fashion imaginable, and much of the ground had the consistency of some hideous pudding. There wasn’t much to be done about that, though Nick did mutter some vile curses against the nearest beetle who stared back without concern, spitting a series of titular snaps through its chitinous mandibles.

“I’m sure they’re much more palatable creatures when you get to know them,” Judith suggested weakly. “At least they’re not trying to kill us.”

“Yeah, unlike those guys,” Nick breathed, coming to a dead halt and pointing to the entrance, which at that moment began to fill with armed guards until, standing shoulder-to-shoulder, they blockaded the gateway completely, like clenched teeth in a grimacing maw. Out of those serried ranks strode DelGato and Fangmeyer, looking less than impressed. DelGato in particular had a wild exasperation about him; he had the physique for predation, but the chase had left him with a windblown mane full of filth, and he seemed to be in a mental struggle to decide if he was about to arrest his quarry, or lop them into pieces with his heavy broadsword.

“Ok, your fun’s over,” he growled. “Not many get second chances with me, and no-one gets a third. Now, for the last time, throw down your weapons and submit to arrest.”

Nick and Judith began to back up, glancing about desperately for a means of escape and finding none. Their dismay was amusing to the guards blocking the only exit, and their delight only intensified to thigh-slapping laughter when Judith, in a fit of desperate spontaneity, sprinted to the nearest stable and leaped astride one of the clickers, slicing through its cinching lead with her dagger and grasping the trailing ends as if they were reigns.

“Come on Nick!” she called.

Nick, looking utterly appalled, glanced across to where several of the guards had doubled over in hysterics. Even Fangmeyer appeared patiently curios; the lion was the only one who looked as if he had come down on a definite answer vis-a-vie the lop-or-arrest question. Nick didn’t like the idea of being apprehended, but he liked it a lot more than the idea of being apprehended while trying to escape on the back of an oversized dung-beetle.

“You must be senile, Carrots,” he whined. “This is the worst idea in the world.”

“Then we should both be embarrassed that this is the only idea we’ve got!” she snapped. “Now hurry up!”

With the grudging distaste of someone called upon to do something loathsome, he clambered up the clicker’s chitinous flank, sat behind Judith and, when it became awkwardly clear that there were no other pawholds, wrapped his arms around her waist. Then Judith realised she had no notion of how to induce these inert beasts to move. With no better solutions occurring, she gave the reigns a vigorous snap and cried, in her best bugherd’s tone, “Giddyup!”

The clicker didn’t budge. The only movement was the last few standing guards rolling onto their backs in paroxysms of laughter, and of Fangmeyer and DelGato, whose collective patience was exhausted, striding forward to end this farcical performance.

“We need to go a bit faster than this,” Nick mumbled, his face falling.

“C-come on, you!” Judith tried, one fist hammering on the bug’s impervious pronotum. “Ah...advance! Mush! Onward!” But the insect remained completely insensate to the presence, let alone the whims, of the riders on its back, and in a final burst of exasperation, Judith screamed, “Oh, by Nym’s golden gonads! How the hell do you get this thing to—”

“Go!” Nick cried, cocking one leg and burying his heel viciously into the clicker’s soft abdomen.

Clickers are, without a doubt, the most docile, quiet-natured creature in the whole panoply of creation. Despite their fearsome appearance, if left to their own devices they will do nothing besides chew grass, defecate, and occasionally mate in the most embarrassingly languid fashion imaginable. There are species of moss that are more animated.

It had never occured, though, to whomever was responsible for promulgating this particular wisdom, to kick one in the belly rather unexpectedly, and rather hard.

The insect suddenly loosed a terrifying screech and reared up on its hind legs, nearly bucking its two surprised riders directly off before lurching forward and stampeding towards the exit. Fangmeyer and DelGato, though caught by surprise, managed to execute a pair of curt, martial rolls to the side; the Grey guards, who had been squealing with laughter, were suddenly squealing in fright. They tried to scramble out of the way, but they hadn’t a tenth of Bogo’s sergeants’ athleticism, and the clicker rode right over them, trampling two into the dust and knocking the others aside as if they’d been struck by an enormous, black-iron hammer, leaving them sprawling on the ground as it caroomed down the street.

Judith and Nick, completely powerless to influence the beetle’s direction, had no choice but to cling desperately to whatever parts afforded purchase, jostling and sliding on its slick shell and crying out preemptive apologies to the astounded Ashkadodians who dived into alleys or drains or wherever protection from being flattened could be found. Judith heaved mightily on the ropes, hoping this might impart some inkling of her preferred course, but it was to no avail—they were going wherever this perturbed insect wanted.

Fortunately, wherever that turned out to be, they were going to get there quickly; the clicker’s busy legs were carrying them faster than Fangmeyer or DelGato could hope to match, and their pursuers were now far behind and receding further. Provided their mount kept on its current bearing—hemmed in on either side by buildings and alleymouths too narrow for the clicker to turn down, this seemed a likely outcome—they would probably end up deposited somewhere downtown, directly adjacent the city harbour.

Suddenly, all Judith’s fear at being on a rudderless beetle-ride evaporated as she realised they would beat the odds yet again. Behind her Nick was still wailing, and she twisted around to bid him calm down. His raucous outburst, however, was not one of alarm, but rather of elation. 

“Look at us go, Carrots!” he laughed. “We’re untouchable!”

Lost in the throes of excitement, he roweled the clicker on with another kick to the abdomen; with each strike of his bootheel the beetle shot forward faster and faster.

“Woah! Nick! Ease up on those spurs!” Judith warned. But she spoke too late, and Nick wouldn’t have listened anyway. He delivered one last particularly excited kick when, suddenly, from right beneath them, came a sharp  _ crack _ .

Judith’s eyes snapped open. “What was that?”

For a moment, Nick panicked that he’d broken their mount like a china figurine. But it was much worse than that.

What had actually happened was the suture down the beetle’s back had split open, and from under these black elytra unfurled a pair of crisp, iridescent wings.

Nick’s face fell. “Judith...did you know these things can fly? Because...”

The clicker’s wings began to buzz, generating the most terrifying noise either of them had ever heard, loud enough to defeat an entire plague of lesser locust. And then, all of a sudden, they weren’t scampering down a street, but rather hovering a few feet above it. And then a few yards. And then, before anything could be done, they were above the rooftops and rising, with every mammal standing on the ground, Enforcement or otherwise, staring up at them in gape-mouthed shock.

Judith’s eyes bulged as large as grapefruits. Already they were high enough above the city’s gables that, if they did fall off, they’d break something. And she didn’t mean someone’s outdoor furniture.

“Nick! Why did you do that?!” she squealed, redoubling her grip on the ropes.

“Oh, don’t be so critical!” he shouted back. “We’re not being chased any more, are we?” There was some truth in that, though it smacked of solving the problem of a hat that doesn’t fit by cutting of your own head.

They were easily a hundred feet above the city now, and the clicker showed no inclination of going anywhere but higher. Even the largest buildings looked tiny and toylike from this dizzying vantage, the grand alcazar’s rooftop garden reduced to a small green marble. The only thing that was growing was the Great Sand Sea, which swelled as if it were being fed by some monstrous incoming tide, and Nick realised with a shrinking heart that the beetle was heading for the horizon.

“This overgrown mosquito is taking us over the ocean!” he cried above the ear-numbing roar of the clickers’ wings.

“Then we can jump into it!” Judith shouted back. “It’s close to the wharf!”

“What!? You want to jump into what, as far as I can tell, is effectively quicksand!? Besides, we’re still up way too high!”

“We’ll use the Tooth to slow our fall! Just like we did beneath Black Peak!”

“Again, I have concerns: one, the part about the quicksand again, and two, last time we did this, we hit water, and it still stung like a snakebite! If we do the same here, we’ll end up as flat as a crepe in a vice! But I have a better idea!”

“I’m all ears!”

“What have we learned that these things like more than anything?!”

“I don’t know. Sleeping? Excreting?”

“Hay! They like to eat hay!”

“And how does that help us?”

Nick rolled his fright-wide eyes, like a master-at-arms trying to explain swordplay to a dim squire while an army was bearing down on them. “Use your gem to bring the hay to us! Then this giant grasshopper will follow it down!”

For a moment Judith was silent, and then she shrieked, “Nick! That’s genius! You’ve solved it!”

“Well, that’s what you don’t pay me for. Where’s that damned silage yard?”

They spotted it reeling below them, stacks of drying grass that looked from this height like an autumnal forest, and Judith thrust her paw into the collar of her cape and withdrew her necklace, the stone blazing bright azure even under the desert sun. Then a knot of nerves suddenly bunched in her gullet, making swallowing too hard; this as the first time she’d called upon the power of her stones since they’d been made a pair, there was no way to tell what the outcome of this would be, whether the sorcery would do her bidding or would drain her empty. But there was no other option, so she wrapped the tooth in her fear-tightened fist and whispered, in an ancient tongue that almost no one could understand, for its magic to make her will reality

At first, nothing happened. 

And then Nick saw it. A great wobbling orb of the stuff, racing towards them like a tawn meteor, shedding a tail of errant stalks as it flew. With expert control Judith sailed the ball of chaff under whatever equivalent of a nose the clicker possessed, hoping to entice it like a bass after a juicy worm. And, almost at once, the beetle jettisoned all previous grievances from its minute brain to make room for a single, overpowering commandment—to eat.

“It’s working!” cried Nick, watching the plaything city beneath him get bigger as they lost altitude. “Well done, Judith!”

“This isn’t as easy as it looks!” Judith groaned. She was not just hurling some heavy object aside, but trying to chart the course for a thousand individual grass-stems, which demanded more concentration and effort than she was prepared for. And the tax of having both stones was not easily discounted, like running a hundred-meter dash wearing twice the weight of your usual clothing. A grimace stretched her face. The clump of hay began to break up.

Desperate, Judith drew the hayclump down faster, steepening the angle of their descent by a frightening degree. Nick let out a mighty squeal, clinging to the clicker’s pronotum so tightly it was in danger of snapping off in his paws. They were directly above one of the wall’s golden cupolas, and its tapered point was rushing straight toward them like a gigantic shiny spearhead.

A moment before they were skewered, Judith yanked the ball up, and the clicker levelled out over the towertops, still chasing the hayclump with glutinous determination. But the ball was beginning to fracture, streams of neglected hay breaking off and flying past the beetle’s head.

“I can’t keep this up much longer!” cried Judith, as her vision began to blur from fatigue. “Where the hell is the harbour?”

“Can’t you see it?!”

“I’m not just making conversation here, Nick!”

“Alright, alright, keep going straight—”

Neither of them saw it until it was too late—a long Grey banner, sweeping and coiling in the warm morning wind. They ploughed straight into it, the whipping fabric nearly pulling them both right out of the saddle. They managed to hang on, but the hayclump did not survive, exploding in a shower of loose chaff. With its only incentive removed, the clicker suddenly became very interested in bucking its unwelcome passengers off, and while it thrashed and hissed, and Judith and Nick clung on for all they were worth, it spun out of control right through someone’s garden canopy, blasting it to detritus. It bounced once, twice, spun upside down, tipped its riders off, and finally everyone skated to a jarring halt against the wall of an enclosed courtyard in a pile of wood, groans and bruises.

Lying on his back and staring up at the sky, Nick both wondered at the fact that he was alive, and whether that was really such a good thing anyway. He’d landed on his rucksack, and something rock-hard was jabbing him in the kidney—either his lump of indestructible amaranthine ore, or his equally durable chicken sausage. Lamenting this and other wounds, he managed to get to his feet and saw the clicker roll over, hiss at them with such vitriol that Nick assumed it was the insect equivalent of an insult, and then take to the skies once more without them, vanishing beyond the rim of the courtyard roof.

“Yeah,” Nick mumbled, “so long to you too...you oversized louse.”

A few feet away, Judith was struggling to get upright. The crash had been more than her leoprine agility could cope with, and she’d struck the ground face-first, raising a swelling knot between her eyes. It seemed this, along with her use of magic, had sucked out her vitality, and even just sitting down she appeared completely woozy, rocking side-to-side like an inverted pendulum.

“Well, Nick, perhaps we’ll make a bug-herd out of you yet,” she slurred sarcastically. “You have the gift to make the laziest creatures in the world move with, to be ruthlessly honest, more speed and urgency than is necessary.”

Nick dusted himself down, double-checked that accoutrements were all accounted for, and, in a rare display of solidarity, crossed to his partner and extended her a helping paw. “Maybe I got a bit carried away there,” he admitted. “But you have to admit, it worked.”

From somewhere in the midst of Judith’s brainmatter, where two or three severe headaches were battling for supremacy, the impulse to grin sparked and then arrived on her lips. Because he was right—somehow, they had left their pursuers far behind, cheated death once or twice, and could now make their way unimpeded to the dock and their waiting skiff. Maybe this almighty Shamla really had selected them as his lucky champions.

Well, if they did have a divine chaperone, there was no sense standing around and wasting his protection.

“Come on, let’s get out of this wretched city,” Judith said, and she rushed, on slightly doddery feet, for the courtyard exit and the streets beyond—

A huge and heavy club suddenly appeared from behind the wall and struck Judith across the temple. She went from conscious to un- faster than Nick could blink in shock, her eyes glazing over like frozen ponds, her jaw hanging slack on loose hinges.

The bludgeon that had knocked her senseless then seized her by the base of the ears and lifted her off her feet, revealing itself to be not some polished metal truncheon, but rather the muscular and armored forearm of a very large mammal…

Bogo stepped into full view, fixing Nick in place with an angry stare from under the shelf of his frowning brow. His eyes shifted from Nick to the rabbit dangling limply from his hoof and back. “My name is Bogo, Captain of the Enforcement,” he stated crisply. “The pair of you have been accused of inciting public disturbance, of theft, of property destruction, and of other crimes prejudicial to the decent order of  _ my  _ city.” 

“They’ve got other mistakes to answer for!” came a shrill voice, and from under Bogo’s greaves stepped Weaselton, levelling an accusatory finger at Nick. “You’ve got a dagger that belongs to me, you worthless vulpine, so I’ll be needing that back. Also, you snapped one of my teeth clean off, so, once you return the blade, I reckon it’s fair that we make some alterations to your smile as well…”

Weaselton took a step forward, but Bogo advanced one leg to block his path. “I don’t know what you’re doing here, you crook, but the fox’s fate is no business of yours. Be on your way.”

“Wait a minute!” piped the weasel in aggrieved tones. “I told you where these two flea-sacks were. It was my testimony that led you to them. It’s only fair that they pay for what they did. What about my tooth?!”

Without even glancing down, Bogo lashed the back of his hoof across the weasel’s muzzle, twice as hard as Nick ever was with the tabletop. Weaselton went as limp as a boned fish and slumped to the ground. There was an audible skitter as his other tooth bounced across the sandstone floor. Bogo’s gaze on Nick scarcely flinched.

“Willingly or otherwise, you’re coming with me, and you’re coming in chains. Put your weapons aside and your paws in front of you.”

Nick did not comply—nothing surprising in that, for he had never complied with such an order in his life. He might have been silent for devising a cunning stratagem to get them out of this crisis. But he wasn’t. He was thinking: 

_ Gods, this buffalo is big enough to bang his head on the sun! I bet his turds are bigger than me! And look at that hammer! Look at the bleeding size of it! I’d need twenty of me to lift that! That’s the sort of bludgeon you use to knock a sodding castle over with! It’s a siege-weapon! _

And then, when his brain quit the business of making comparisons, he realised that the only way to escape, and a slim chance at best, was to make some feint and try to dash right between the buffalo’s legs, and pray that he wasn’t always as fast with his other arm.

Doing so would mean leaving Judith behind.

And he couldn’t do that.

Bogo clearly read the deceit being drafted on the open book of Nick’s brain, but it mattered nothing; before he chose to act, or before Nick could devise some means of rescuing them both from danger, there was a deafening rattle of equipage, of buckles and chains and chapes, and an entire squadron of Enforcement guards spilled into the archway and leveled their swords and spears at him. They needn’t have bothered, for Bogo was army enough, but this phalanx of reinforcements really was the period at the end of an inarguable declaration. Nick had, at long last, found himself in a situation he couldn’t talk, fight, or buy his way out of. He was bested.

He swallowed. Then he knelt down on the sandy floor, closed his eyes, and put his wrists together.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So concludes Act 1 of the second Wounded World. I hope you enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it...albeit, I went over this last chapter about 80 times trying to make it all connect, so writing it became akin to having my fingernails pulled out.
> 
> I joke. Hammering stories out of word-scrap is still my favourite thing in the world, and I reckon this first installment is solidly cohesive, reasonably light-hearted, and sets the coming adventure up nicely. I'm splitting it into 3 acts because it would be a brutal task to write this entire story in one sitting, and I'll come back to it once the next Of Salt And Steel is done, which is what I'm writing now. It'll take me a while before I'm confidant enough to start posting - it's another story that started with a modest plan and has since begun sprawling all over the place in a sea of digressions and details. But I won't be gone for ever. And when I come back, it will be with a monocular fox and a courageous rabbit in tow.
> 
> Until then, adieu. Thanks again for the comments and kudos, and thanks to my editor, Mersharr, for keeping my punctuation sensible and my brains from leaking out my ears.


End file.
